original lautner drawing, sheats residence, 1959.
Rendering, Sheats Residence, 1963; © The John Lautner Foundation. Used with permission to set himself apart from the more formalist Frank Lloyd Wright protégés who preceded him here— Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. Those two, perhaps more celebrated modernists, stayed mostly true to the egalitarian / socialist ontology of modernism( an aesthetic that would take decades to become the stuff of bourgeois desire), while Lautner was a little bit rock‘ n’ roll— a maverick even within the progressive Frank Lloyd Wright school.
Lautner was born in 1911 in Marquette, Michigan, to an academic father and artist mother. Lautner’ s parents were art and architecture enthusiasts and key influences on Lautner. The Lautner family built their summer home on Lake Superior themselves. Lautner’ s mother designed and painted all the interior details— a formative experience for Lautner who in later years would pay as much attention to the interiors of his homes as the exteriors. Lautner studied philosophy, ethics, literature, drafting and architecture along the way to earning a bachelors degree in liberal arts at Northern Michigan University, where his father taught. though his parents were both fans of architecture and building, Lautner had little interest in the formal aspects of drafting and preferred, even during his fellowship at Frank Lloyd Wrights Taliesin studios in Wisconsin and Arizona, to stay out of the drafting room and get his hands dirty in the construction process, something he learned to love building that summer home.
Lautner came to Los Angeles, like Schindler and Neutra before him, to supervise various Frank Lloyd Wright commissions. He built his first solo project, the Lautner House, on Micheltorena in Silver Lake, in 1939, a year after his arrival. It was an auspicious beginning, featured in a big splashy spread in Home Beautiful magazine and was praised as the best house in the United States by an architect under 30 by the eminent architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock. it didn’ t take long for Lautner to showcase his derring-do. In the mid-to-late 40s the iconic coffeehouse aesthetic known as Googie architecture was born, taking its name from the Lautner-designed Googie’ s Coffee Shop on Sunset and Crescent Heights, which followed the three Coffee Dan’ s restaurants he designed. The style— with its signature cantilevered structures, boomerang shapes, upward tiling rooftops, acute angles and high-energy scripts— became synonymous with the atomic-age
kitsch that was often derided as too lowbrow and vernacular to be taken seriously by the architectural establishment. More recently, though, a critical reassessment has recognized Googie’ s value as an expression of sunny postwar populism and a worthwhile emblem of the times. No doubt, nostalgia has played a big part in that reassessment. But, the playfulness of the style, the optimism and the eye-catching forms would all become integral elements of Lautner’ s palette.
While Googie made a lasting impression on the commercial landscape of Southern California during its postwar coming of age, Lautner set about in earnest putting his stamp on the area’ s residential aesthetic in the mid-50s, beginning with Silvertop in 1956. Then the Chemosphere followed in 1960, the Sheats( Goldstein) Residence in 1960 and the Elrod House in Palm Springs in 1968.
Lautner integrated the boldness of Googie design with the unique challenges each home presented. The Chemosphere was an answer to the“ insane”( as he called it) practice of digging into steep hillsides to build foundations and structures. The Elrod House perfectly fits into the rugged desert bluff on which it is built. Silvertop looks as natural on the hilltop overlooking Silver Lake Reservoir as a cherry looks on top of a sundae. Surrounded by gauche neo-classical mansions rising up like warts in the foliage above Beverly Hills, the Sheats / Goldstein House is as unobtrusive as a cave in the side of a mountain. That Lautner manages this integration with the flair and style that set him apart from his contemporaries is testament to his particular genius.
THE HAT COLLECTOR Goldstein alighted from Milwaukee at 18 to go to Stanford. There he studied math and physics, but decided he wanted to get into finance and came to Los Angeles for grad school. Another problem with staying in the Bay Area: It had no professional basketball team at the time. Though he was yet to become, in the words of NBA commissioner David Stern,“ the single biggest and most extravagantly dressed NBA fan in the world,” basketball was still a passion, going back to his teenage days as a statistician for the Milwaukee Hawks.
“ At that time,” Goldstein says of his arrival in Los Angeles,“ I was still involved with football and baseball, as a spectator, but I realized as the years went on that those sports didn’ t
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