Many architects think they know how to design a futuristic house, a space age house, a residence for cosmonauts, high tech rich people or James Bond. According to a widespread understanding, such a house should, in at least one part, have a circular or oval base, glass walls, large interior spaces, very little furniture, and it should be dominated by structural elements of unusual curved lines. But, those who tried to put it into practice, were severely criticized. It turned out that these so-called “houses of the future” became the target of ridicule as incongruous, naive, impractical and unusable, in short… ridiculous. Some of them remained unfinished, because the clients gave up on the purchase, others were torn down sooner or later, and the finished ones are still maliciously mocked by idle Internet browsers.
All the greater is the success of John Lautner, an architect who became famous by designing just such objects. His houses inspire respect among professionals and envy among snobs. They are rented for shooting glamorous films and expensive commercials, famous and rich people live in them, and if, which is very unlikely, one of them changes hands, the price could be tens of millions of dollars. How did Lautner achieve such great success where others have floundered? The road to that was long and difficult, and some psychological pitfalls had to be overcome.
The beginning of a career in the shadow of F. L. Wright
John Lautner comes from a family of Michigan intellectuals where he received a general, broad, liberal education. At the university where his father taught, he graduated in so-called liberal arts, according to a program that in American universities leads to a broad education and develops the skill of rational thinking freed from any ideology. When leading American architect Frank Lloyd Wright announced that he was accepting apprentices, a combination of his personal qualities and influential parents brought young John to Wright’s design office, Taliesin. Given F. L. Wright’s reputation, it was certainly a privilege, but if you are among the more ambitious, there is also a certain danger, because you may never step out of the shadow of your mentor and remain his eternal imitator, which, more or less, actually happened to all of Wright’s collaborators.
It seemed then that John Lautner was the perfect candidate for such a fate. His admiration for F.L.Wright was almost cheeky. Many years later, comparing Wright to Corbusier, Mies, Gropius and other architectural greats he knew personally, he impolitely but honestly claimed that they were nothing compared to Wright. As a young associate, John lived out ideas about the principles of organic architecture, the way space follows function, and the fitting of details into the whole. He always remembered, as the most important thing, that you have to have a big complete idea about the object you are working on, a total concept, otherwise the result will be only an unsuccessful incongruity.
A painful search for your own style
After leaving Taliesin for Los Angeles, for the next several years, Lautner mainly supervised the facilities that Wright designed for clients in California. At that time, John Lautner was already so attuned to his mentor’s style that, according to his own words, he could easily imitate him on any occasion and at any time of the day or night, …if he wanted to.
But at that time, he didn’t want it anymore. A key moment in his career was when he decided to consciously break away from F. L. Wright’s influence on him,…so where it broke, it broke. He decided to apply all the basic principles he had learned, but that his objects must be original at all costs. It was a thorny path marked by the bitterness of initial failures. The reputation he had was soon largely destroyed, so, well, even at the age of forty, he still hasn’t received a license for independent design. For a while, he was even a favorite target of derisive criticism from the highly aestheticized architectural elite, primarily because of his participation in the formation of the so-called Googie architecture, rated as cheap, commercialized derivatives of Art Deco, …or something. On the other hand, when he showed fresh, original ideas in residential projects, it went completely unnoticed. He received rave reviews for only one object, but ironically, it was when he did exactly what he was trying to get away from, when, for the one and only time, at the express request of a client, he did the project the way Wright would have done it. It seemed at the time that the whole world was trying to stop Lautner from developing his own style.
But the charms of global politics gave the events a different course. In the newly opened front of the Cold War, the conquest of space, to everyone’s surprise, the Soviets demonstrated an initial advantage and their communist leaders rubbed their hands with satisfaction. America, of course, had to take up the space challenge and did so with great enthusiasm. In the following years, space flights became a national obsession, precisely at the moment when John Lautner finally fully matured to mark that heroic time with his creativity.
Chemosphere
In such circumstances, in 1960, Lautner was commissioned to design a family home for a young aerospace engineer in Los Angeles on a 45-degree slope, on terrain that seemed impossible to build on. Lautner, dead-cold, made a futuristic house in the form of a common folk image of a flying saucer, octagonal, with a combined wooden and concrete structure, glass walls and a panoramic view of the City of Angels.
The house is called the Chemosphere, which is a word that means nothing but sounds very scientific. The success was spectacular and the critics fell silent. To be fair, Chemosphere has its flaws: the support column under the house is too dominant, and the resemblance to a flying saucer has a touch of banality, but these were small things, which did not spoil the author’s moment of triumph. The sudden interest in Lautner subsequently revealed a high level of innovation in his earlier works as well.
Now suddenly everyone was racing to praise him and he became the hero of the moment. Moreover, the information surfaced somewhere that F.L.Wright claimed for Lautner that he was the second best architect in the world. Hmm…that was before Lautner did his best work and while the first best was apparently still alive.
Since then, the house has been used several times for the filming of TV shows and movies. Today’s owner of the house is millionaire Benedikt Taschen, a well-known publisher of high-volume books on art and architecture, including a monograph on Lautner, among others.
Sheats-Goldstein residence
Orders started pouring in. Clients were constantly looking for something even newer, more modern, more futuristic. Fortunately, there were more ideas in the wizard’s hat ready to be implemented. The house designed for the Sheats family (1961-1963) in Los Angeles was an even bigger success.
What was good in Chemosphere is now even more emphasized, and there are no doses of banality in this facility. The principle of the total concept that Lautner learned from his mentor triumphed again: first you have to be a real professional and have in mind the correct solution of the function, and then with that in mind, create an attractive visual effect.
And this house has become a favorite location for shooting glamorous Hollywood movies. The current owner of this residence is the mysterious rich man James Goldstein, who occasionally resorted to its adaptations and hired Lautner for the design each time, as long as the latter was alive.
Elrod House
The 1968 house designed for designer Arthur Elrod is another major professional success. It is located on a hill that rises above Palm Springs, a desert city in California. Again, of course, the large glass surfaces provide a spectacular view, as in the previously mentioned houses.
Perhaps it can be said that the principles of organic architecture reach their peak in this building. Natural rock is used as the wall of the house. The glass divides the interior from the exterior in the most imperceptible way, by being shaped according to the natural rock that acts as a window frame. The pool is both inside and outside. The unusual shape of the roof, of course, serves to control insolation and create diffuse lighting…
The attractive architecture of this building did not escape the cinematographers. In the movie “Diamonds Are Forever”, in an unforgettable scene, James Bond fights two young, beautiful and skilled opponents in this house, only to defeat them in the pool. It really looks fantastic.
Hope Residence
Not far from the Elrod House, on the same hill in Palm Springs, is the residence of Bob Hope, a famous Hollywood comedian.
Lautner, due to disagreement with the interventions made in the interior by Bob’s wife Dolores, distanced himself from this object, so it is unjustifiably marginalized in the list of Lautner’s best works. Now that Bob and Dolores have died, the house is up for sale and is being offered for around $50 million.
What kind of architecture is that?
John Lautner’s architecture is easily thought of as space-like. It’s a prejudice. It happened by chance that the time when he created was marked by atomic weapons and space conquests, so his architecture associates us with that. If we speak objectively, there is nothing cosmic in that architecture. It is simply good architecture, worldly, expert, professional, thoughtful, but additionally it is emphatically original.
At a party at the Elrod House, Lautner was asked to describe the type of architecture he employed for this house. Not so good with words as with shapes, Mr. Lautner could only come up with one word: “Timeless.”
