John Lautner: New Book on the Far-Out Architect

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger:

One of the more eye-catching new books to come my way this season is Between Heaven and Earth: The Architecture of John Lautner (above), the publication for an eponymous retrospective that opens at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, on July 13. This book and forthcoming exhibition are latest evidence of a gathering campaign to elevate the posthumous reputation of Lautner (1911-1994), a curious figure in late 20th-century American architecture.

Marginal among his fellow modernists, he was best known for spaceship-like residential schemes set amidst dramatic, isolated Western landscapes. Commissioned by clients who included Bob Hope and Miles Davis, Lautner's freeform concrete structures---flamboyant, scaleless and inevitably cantilevered---evoke the sculptural extravagance of his celebrated older contemporary, the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (who turned 100 late last year), though Lautner never enjoyed the international following commanded by that more humanely attuned form-giver.

I've long suspected that many hip Lautner enthusiasts see him as a latter-day Morris Lapidus, the diamond-in-the-rough Miami Beach Modernist patronized by Postmodernists as a pet primitive, much as Picasso, Apollinaire, and company treated their mascot, the douanier Rousseau, with a sardonic (if not insincere) mixture of admiration and condescension for believing he exemplified their theories avant le lettre. The burgeoning Lautner league cannot mean us to take his bombastic expressionism with complete seriousness, can they?

Although Lautner studied for five years during the 1930s with Frank Lloyd Wright at the Taliesin Fellowship, the pupil's later approach to designing in concert with nature was quite different from that of the master. Granted, Wright's geriatric output often departed from the organic integration of manmade and natural that epitomized his best earlier work, from the Prairie Houses to Fallingwater. But the triumphalist engineering arrogance that became Lautner's hallmark was the very opposite of Wright's essential naturalist credo.

I will give due consideration to the new book's principal essay, by the eminent architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen, whose opinions I always respect. However, I'm likely to always regard Lautner with the same contempt that I reserve for that risibly tasteless magazine, Architectural Digest, which most often published his mondo bizarro houses, landmarks of an America I want nothing to do with.