This book includes a plain text version that is designed for high accessibility. To use this version please follow this link.
John Lautner
Dissolving the Confines
By Nicholas Olsberg

It is said that the great subject of American culture is the contemplation of space, and that the truest model of an American artist is the rebellious idealist from the wilderness who works with stunning but unselfconscious originality. Growing up in the north woods, with contempt for academies and conventions, finding rules only in the laws of nature, and with absolute confidence that truth could emerge only from the force of his own imagination, the Los Angeles architect John Lautner (1911– 94) was an artist firmly in this native tradition. His great subject was the uncovering of space, and his work was a search for structures and shapes that would liberate that space to capture a sublime sense of spaciousness. Until very recently, the supple and sinuous results that came from this quest — fluid spaces and molded forms, buildings as archetypal shelter and buildings as transcendent vista — seemed extravagantly, even shockingly, original. Now, as architecture everywhere is moving into this sculptural territory, we are looking differently at those like Lautner who first took it past the orthodox systems and geometries of the International school toward a more luxuriant, emotive and fluent modernism. What once looked eccentric now seems pioneering; what once seemed self-indulgent now looks extraordinarily disciplined.

Lautner was raised in Marquette, Michigan, on the wooded shores of Lake Superior. His father was a professor of humanities, steeped in German Idealist philosophy. His mother was a painter with a wide interest in mystical and mythical views of nature and the universe, from Nordic folk beliefs to Sufi and Sanskrit poetry. Determined to raise their only son as a student both of “Nature” and of Idealist philosophy, they built a boldly austere wooden city house (Keepsake) for John to be born in. Unpainted, meeting the land without a threshold, the house was designed to educate Lautner to the virtues of simplicity, ground him in pioneer and Pilgrim traditions and surround him – beneath a gigantic sheltering roof — with symbolic furnishings and murals and the literature of aesthetics and ideas that would excite an original imagination. With Midgaard (1923-28), the summer cabin the family built together in the mid 1920s, the relationship of child to nature, and of nature to design, intensified. Lautner claimed that his boyhood experience building it – winching logs up from the shore, battening them together for its roof, truing his lines with the lake’s horizon — taught him “all I ever needed to know about architecture.” Drawing on Norwegian folk beliefs for its argument, Norse architecture for its design and decorated to suggest a transcendental relationship with the sky and stars, Midgaard was, for Lautner’s mother, “the rainbow bridge between earth and heaven.”

For Lautner, these childhood horizons, both natural and philosophical, led to a persistent fascination with the forms and auras Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117
Produced with Yudu - www.yudu.com. Publish online for free with YUDU Freedom - www.yudufreedom.com.