by its continuity with the terrain, and which uses the play between open and closed, shelter and vista, angularity and curve, to cause light to dance through it, like sunshine traversing a clearing in the woods or notes tumbling off the strings of a violin.
Lautner’s most famous work, Chemosphere (1960), shapes another drum but releases itself from the topography altogether to settle on a pole. This was Lautner’s most ambitious attempt at demonstrating a repeatable standardized dwelling system, and it was heralded or scorned as a Space Age form in the press worldwide. In fact, Chemosphere was not only a reasonable solution to working on a 45-degree slope. It was also a workable economic model for the efficient living capsule of the future. Its focus on vista and enclosure moved far beyond the mechanistic visions of the “House of Tomorrow” that were appearing so widely to propose a more sympathetic relationship with the natural environment and a warmer domestic palette and language.
From the late ‘50s, Lautner began to discover the poetry of concrete, a material that could “express structure,” shifting its tones with changing light, carrying fluent lines, making space sinuous and yet conveying permanence and solidity. Concrete thus suggested how the house, in whatever material, might become an essay in shaping vistas. Both the scale of Lautner’s work and the scope of his conversation with nature expanded, as he moved his built forms into a dialogue with the sky, approaching them with cascading ramps, bordering them with an infinity pool, and shaping them with colliding catenary and parabolic curves, or with overlapping angles that stretch out to geometries that are never closed. At the Sheats House (1963), in concrete folded as sharply as origami, Lautner sliced a shelf on a Bel Air hill so that the house could rest on it, draping an elbow over the side and opening a gigantic mouth toward the distant horizon with its shimmering sense of the sea.
In Los Angeles, wilderness and city, slope and flatland, sublime horizons and banal streetscapes constantly collide. Lautner focused increasingly on the feeling of continuity enabled by extension into the natural site, geometric lines that seem to stretch into the topography, natural elements that are drawn into the structure, or — as in the Walstrom House (1969) — by carrying patterns of movement through built space into the surrounding natural environment. In this modest two-bedroom house on a steep slope, Lautner chose to build “in timber away from the mountainside.” The wooden frame rests on a concrete foundation at street level and on two anchor beams that slope into the hillside, allowing him to eliminate all retaining walls and leave a vertical clear space inside. By subtly twisting the diagonal geometries of wood and glass enclosing the
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