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?
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.
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LEE ROSENBAUM
I'm a veteran cultural journalist who writes frequently for the Wall Street Journal's "Leisure & Arts" page. I've been a regular cultural contributor on New York Public Radio (WNYC). I've appeared as an art-market commentator on BBC-TV and have published numerous Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. I am author of The Complete Guide to Collecting Art (Knopf) and have lectured on cultural property issues at the New Acropolis Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, on deaccessioning at Columbia Law School, the University of Iowa and the annual conference of the Museum Association of New York, and on museum governance and cultural property issues at Seton Hall University. more
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