Alan Hess (1) (1952–)

John Lautner might have been known as one of the greatest modern architects, but the towering presence of Frank Lloyd Wright, his contemporary in California, overshadowed him. Decades ahead of their time, Lautner’s radical designs for private houses were known only to a few. Lautner’s clear strengths as a designer - bold forms, organic details, technological innovations - are uncovered here in biography, analysis and interviews tracing the entire span of Lautner’s career from the 1940s show more to the 1990s. New photographs of 25 important designs reveal Lautner’s multifaceted houses, particularly his innovative use of modern structural systems - steel, cantilevers, wood bents and concrete. Lautner’s residential work has been a huge influence on a generation of young architects who have re-discovered him, and his ever-changing forms are a testament to his daring exploration of modernism and his astonishing originality. This book focuses on the key buildings, capturing the breathtaking interiors and extraordinary vistas that characterize his work, and showing the range, quality and evolution of his ideas.
John Lautner's sixty years in architecture comprise one of the great unexamined careers of the twentieth century. Rooted in a personal design philosophy that is the imaginative extension of the organic architectural theories of Frank Lloyd Wright (he was one of Wright's first apprentices), his exuberant designs and broad spectrum of approaches epitomize the landscape of southern California-from the fifties techno-optimism of the drive-in, freeway, and Cadillac tail fin to the structural innovation of opulent hilltop houses overlooking the ocean. Despite the extraordinary technical achievements of his concrete roofs, steel cantilevers, and double curves, dynamic engineering is never the main point of his work. The push-button glass walls and retracting roofs, however innovative, always serve to create humane spaces that allow occupants to commune with nature and themselves.

Lautner's career began at Wright's Taliesin in 1933 and continued after his arrival in Los Angeles in 1938. The book traces the unfolding of his protean conceptions up to his death in 1994. During the forties and fifties, he established his own architecture office and designed several small and medium-sized houses of unusual daring and freedom. His eye-popping designs for roadside coffee ships-the celebrated Googie's, with jazzy roof lines and Kaleidoscopic geometry-and California houses sporting hexagonal roofs, free-floating walls, and indoor-outdoor pools, are among these. In the sixties, the now-iconic Chemosphere, Elrod, and Silvertop houses were built. Extravagance and the refinement of his bold expressions mark the buildings of the final phase, the seventies to nineties. For these houses Lautner's athletic use of concrete reaches its zenith. The sweep of the curves and play between site and structure create dizzingly fantastic forms that are indicative of both the core and the frontiers of the twentieth-century American psyche. This volume, with its authorative text by Alan Hess and full-color and black-and-white photography by Alan Weintraub, splendidly captures the breathtaking interior spaces and extraordinary vistas that characterize the work of an architect who is increasingly seen as one of the great American masters of the twentieth century. show less

In Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, Alan Hess examines the swooping lines and gravity-defying structures that permeated 1950s architecture, reflecting the finned cars and found throughout the California highways. Hess begins with an examination of architecture in the ’30s in order to set up how the futurism on display at events such as the New York World’s Fair foreshadowed the styles of the immediate postwar years. He primarily focuses on California and the area around Los show more Angeles, looking at houses, cars, coffee shops, and restaurants like McDonald’s. Hess shifts to the late ’50s, the Las Vegas strip, and the push-back from established architects who did not support styles with such close ties to advertising. Hess concludes, “Until recently, the fifties have been a little too close for critics, writers, and professionals to have a good perspective on them. Most assessments of Coffee Shop Modern are the product of high art critics’ low opinion of the fifties: coffee shops are corruptions of the original, pure high art versions of the modern style. In the rush to establish a single reigning modern style, Googie became a dropped thread in the fabric of Modernism. Rediscovered it shows that Modernism has always been wider than academies acknowledged, that its roots went deeper in the culture than has been admitted since” (pg. 119).

In linking the ’30s with the styles of the ’50s, Hess writes, “Wright and Goff choreographed a flow of movement that carried you along, making you aware of each space and transition. Uninterrupted by conventional doors, walls, corners, or windows, space flows continuously around the next corner and outside. This is the final destruction of the box originally called for by Frank Lloyd Wright. It is also the three-dimensional architecture historian Sigfried Giedion identified with Modernism: buildings perceived as a totality only as one moved through and around them” (pg. 85). He features extensive photographs to demonstrate how these styles opened up and blended both the liminal space of outside/inside as well as merging Earth with sky and linking the roadway to the parking lot.

Writing in the 1980s, when fashions began changing again and moving further away from Googie, Hess described how it was subject to criticism even in its own time. He writes, “The one certain difference between high art and commercial vernacular architecture was the quality of the rhetoric surrounding it. The high art establishment used talented critics and the established journals to let people know what their buildings were about” (pg. 94). Googie, for all its visual language, served primarily commercial and advertising interests and did not appeal to critics. Redevelopment in the 1980s lead to the demolition or repurposing of much of the surviving examples.

Hess’s book will appeal to all those interested in the styles of the postwar era and how the architectural arts blended with advertising and commercialism. Hess’s book thematically follows Roland Marchand’s work, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Hess blends analysis with images, though several of the images that appear behind text are often too dark and make the text difficult to read. Otherwise, this is a good early study of ’50s architecture. show less

Googie is a term that refers to the spage age or ultra modern style that prevailed, in Southern California especially, from about the 30's through the 60's. The name Googie was taken from a coffee shop on Sunset Blvd. designed by John Lautner in 1949. This book isn't just coffee shops, there are other restaurants, car dealerships, homes and cars that display the influence of Googie with restaurants looking like tail fins and cars resembling rocket ships.
Raised in Garden Grove, a lot of this show more was nostalgic for me. Googie was all around when I was a kid, especially as we were just minutes from Disneyland with all the surrounding cheap motels designed to look like the solar system or Aladdin's lamp. These unique structures remained until Disneyland bought all of land around 1999- 2000, and wiped them out. And there in this book was a picture of the Bob's Big Boy in Garden Grove, with it's fat boy statue and Swiss cheese signage, that Mom took my sister and me to on Fridays when Dad worked late. show less

I don't think this one was nearly as good as the book on the houses. Still an interesting look into how the man thought.