Alan Weintraub

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.… (more)

This is a gorgeous introduction to organic architecture, which paralleled, although was never as popular as, the International style, especially among architectural critics. The most famous proponent was Frank Lloyd Wright, but Hess introduces numerous other architects working in the style beginning at the turn of the 19th-20th century and continuing until the present.

"Organic" architecture refers to a match between the architecture, the landscape, and all of the decoration and interior elements. To laymen, the term can reflect designs that almost seem to grow out of the earth and to follow nature. In this sense, Organic architecture often strikes me as an abstract form of Art Nouveau, with its strong lines and mixture of the natural and the machine age. Hess argues that the highly individualistic designs work very well for the particulars of the owners' personal lifestyles.

The book is an introduction because it has very little text and consists almost entirely of wonderful photographs of residential buildings. The less academic among us will have no complaint about that, but others will want to follow up with items from Hess's bibliography.… (more)