John Lautner

John Edward Lautner
Born	(1911-07-16)July 16, 1911 Marquette, Michigan
Died	October 24, 1994(1994-10-24) (aged 83) Los Angeles, California
Nationality	American
Occupation	Architect
Parents	John Edward Lautner (father) Vida Cathleen Gallangher (mother)
Buildings	Malin Residence ("Chemosphere") Pearlman Mountain Cabin Sheats Residence Arango Residence Elrod Residence

Sheats Apartments ("L'Horizon"),
Los Angeles (1949)

John Lautner (16 July 1911 - 24 October 1994) was an influential American architect whose work in Southern California combined progressive engineering with humane design and dramatic space-age flair.

Biography

Lautner was born in Marquette, Michigan in 1911 and was of mixed Austrian and Irish descent. His father John Edward Lautner, who migrated from Germany ca. 1870, was self-educated, but gained a place at the University of Michigan as an adult and then studied philosophy in Göttingen, Leipzig, Geneva and Paris. In 1901 he was appointed as head of French and German at the recently founded Marquette Northern State Normal School (now Northern Michigan University) , where he later became a teacher. His mother Vida Cathleen Gallagher was an interior designer and an accomplished painter.

The Lautners were keenly interested in art and architecture and in May 1918 their Marquette home "Keepsake", designed by Joy Wheeler Dow, was featured in American Architecture. A crucial early influence in Lautner's life was the construction of the family's idlyllic summer cabin, "Midgaard", sited on a rock shelf on a remote headland on the shore on Lake Superior. The Lautners designed and built the cabin themselves and his mother designed and painted all the interior details, based on her study of Norse houses.

In 1929 Lautner enrolled in the Liberal Arts program at his father's college (now renamed Northern State Teachers College), where he studied philosophy, ethics, physics, literature, drafting, art and architectural history, read the work of Immanuel Kant and Henri Bergson, played woodwinds and piano and developed an interest in jazz. He furthered his studies Boston, Massachusetts and New York City. In 1933 Lautner graduated with a degree in liberal arts.

In April 1933, after reading the autobiography of Frank Lloyd Wright Vida Lautner approached the architect, who had recently launched his apprenticeship program at Taliesin. Lautner was quickly admitted to the Fellowship but he had recently become engaged to a neighbour, Mary Faustina ("MaryBud") Roberts and could not afford the fees, so Vida approached MaryBud's mother, who agreed to pay for the couple to join the program. He soon realised that he had little interest in formal drafting and avoided the Taliesin drafting room, preferring daily duties of "carpenter, plumber, farmer, cook and dishwasher, that is an apprentice, which I still believe is the real way to learn" . From 1933-1939 he worked and studied under Wright at the studios in Wisconsin and Arizona, alongside other renowned artists and architects like E. Fay Jones, Paolo Soleri and Santiago Martinez Delgado.

Lautner progressed rapidly under Wright's mentorship. By 1934 -- the year he and MaryBud married -- he was preparing design details for a Wright house in Los Angeles for Alice Millard, working on the Playhouse and Studios at Taliesin, and he had the first of many articles (under the masthead "At Taliesin") published in the Wisconsin State Journal and Capital Times. The following year he was assigned to what became a two-year project supervising a Wright-designed house in Marquette for MaryBud's mother. In 1937 he agreed to oversee the construction of the Johnson residence "Wingspread" (his personal favorite among the Wright projects he worked on) near Racine, Wisconsin and traveled with Wright to supervise photography of the Wiley House in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which became a key source for his own small houses. He was also deeply involved in the construction of the Drafting Room at Taliesin West -- which influenced the design of his Mauer House (1946) -- collated photographs of Wright's work for a 1938 special issue of Architectural Forum and later briefly returned to Taliesin to help assemble models and materials for a 1940 Museum of Modern Art exhibition.

Lautner's direct tutelage under Wright ended when he left the Fellowship in early 1938 (primarily because MaryBud was pregnant) but he told his mentor that, while seeking an independent career, he remained "ready to do anything you or your Fellowship need"; they worked together on around eleven Los Angeles projects over the next five years and their association continued on and off until Lautner established his own practice in 1947. The Lautners arrived in Los Angeles in March 1938 and their first child Karol was born in May. Lautner's first independent project was a low-cost $2500 one-bedroom frame house for the Springer family, built with his contractor friend Paul Speer, but this was to be the only product of their brief collaboration. In September 1938 Wright contacted him and this led to a series of Los Angeles domestic projects, the Sturges, Green, Lowe, Bell and Mauer houses.

His first significant solo project was his own Los Angeles home, the Lautner House (1939), which helped to establish his name -- it was the subject of Lautner's first article on his own work, published in the June-July edition of California Arts & Architcture, and it was featured in Home Beautiful where it was lauded by Henry-Russell Hitchcock as "the best house in the United States by an architect under thirty". During this period Lautner worked with Wright on the designs of the Sturges House in Brentwood Heights, CA. and on the unbuilt Jester House. Lautner supervised the building of the Sturges House for Wright, but during construction he ran into serious design, cost and construction problems which climaxed with the threat of legal action by the owners, forcing Wright to bring in students from Taliesin to complete repairs. In the meantime, the Bell and Green projects had both stalled due to rising costs; the Greens canceled, but Wright gave the Bell commission to Lautner and he also inherited the Mauer House -- Wright failed to finish the working drawings in time, so the Mauers dropped Wright and engaged Lautner in his place. Although the Mauer House was not finished for another five years, the Bell House was quickly completed and it consolidated the success of the Lautner House, earning him wide praise and recognition -- the University of Chicago solicited plans and drawings for use as a teaching tool, and it featured in numerous publications over the next few years including the Los Angeles Times, a 3-page spread in the June 1942 issue of Arts and Architecture, the May 1944 issue House and Garden (which declared it "the model house for California living"), a California Designs feature centering on the Bell and Mauer houses, Architectural Forum, and The Californian .

During 1941 Lautner was again brought in to oversee two more Wright projects that had run into trouble: the redesign of the Ennis House and an ill-fated project for a lavish Malibu residence ("Eaglefeather") for filmmaker Arch Oboler, which was beset by many problems (including the tragic drowning of Oboler's son in a water-filled excavation) and ultimately never completed, although a Lautner-designed retreat for Oboler's wife was eventually built.

During 1942 he designed a caretaker's cottage for the Astor Farm (since demolished) and in 1943 he joined the Structon Company, where he worked on wartime military construction and engineering projects in California, giving him valuable exposure to current developments in construction technology. This also marked the end of his professional association with Frank Lloyd Wright.

In 1944 Lautner pursued joint ventures with architects Samuel Reisbord and Whitney R. Smith before becoming a design associate in the practice of Douglas Honnold. Lautner left the firm after he began a relationship with Honnold's wife Elizabeth Gilman (although the two men reportedly remained friends). Lautner and Gilman married in 1950 after Lautner divorced MaryBud, who returned to Marquette with their four children, daughters Karol Lautner (b. 1938), Mary Beecher Lautner (b. CA, 1944), Judith Munroe Lautner (b. CA, 1946) and son Michael John Lautner (b. Astor Farm, Indio, CA, 1942).

Lautner founded his own practice in Los Angeles in 1946 and his first major commercial commission was the Desert Hot Springs Hotel in 1947. He was granted his architectural license in 1950.

From the late 1940s until his death, Lautner worked primarily on designing domestic residences. His early work was on a relatively modest scale but in later years, as his reputation grew and his client base became more affluent, his design projects became increasingly grand, culminating in the palatial 25,000 sq. ft Arango residence in Acapulco, Mexico. This project, along with his appointment as Olympic Architect for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, were among the highlights of his later career.

After many years of chronic illness Elizabeth Lautner died in 1978; in 1982 Lautner married her carer, Francesca. Lautner's last years were also marred by declining health and loss of mobility and for the last few years of his life he was unable to work, and his practice owed its continued existence to the unflagging support of his client James Goldstein. On Lautner's death in 1994, his protégé Helena Arahuete took over the practice, which continues today.

In recent years Lautner's work has undergone a significant reappraisal, particularly through the efforts of the Hammer Museum, architect Frank Escher and architectural historian Nicholas Olsberg. In 2009 he was the subject of a documentary feature film, Infinite Space: The Architetcture of John Lautner.

Architecture and influence

John Lautner designed over 200 architectural projects during his career, but many designs for larger buildings were never realised. His extant body of work is now dominated by his domestic commissions; although he designed numerous commercial buildings including Googie's, Coffee Dan's and Henry's restaurants and the Lincoln Mercury Showroom in Glendale, sadly, most of these buildings have since been demolished. With a handful of exceptions (e.g. the Arango Residence in Acapulco, the Turner House in Apsen, Colorado, the Harpel House #2 in Anchorage, Alaska) nearly all of Lautner's extant buildings are in California, mostly in and around Los Angeles.

His distinctive application of the principles of Organic Architecture was of course profoundly influenced by his apprenticeship under Frank Lloyd Wright. Speaking of his time at Taliesin, he recalled:

... Mr Wright was around all the time pointing out things that contributed to the beauty of the space, or the building, or the function of the kitchen, or the dining room, or what-have-you. And also the details of construction: how a certain way of detailing, which he would call grammar, contributed to the whole idea, the whole, the total expression. And then he kept accenting the idea that there wasn't any real architecture unless you had a whole idea ... So I really learned that you have to have a major total idea or it's nothing, you know; it's just an assembly. What most people do is is an assembly of cliches or facades or what-have-you ...

Throughout his life Lautner was a passionate admirer of his mentor (to whom he typically referred as "Mr Wright") and he remained a dedicated practitioner of Organic Architecture. His oral history interviews reveal that he had little regard for the International Style and its leading architects:

None of them had anything like Frank Lloyd Wright ... I actually heard in person Gropius, Corbusier, van der Rohe, and all of the big ones. And they're nothing compared to Frank Lloyd Wright. They're just nothing. So when people want to discuss it with me, it's just crazy, that's all. [laughter]

Neverthless, even during the time he worked under Wright, Lautner sought to established his own individual and distinctive style:

...I purposely didn't copy any of Mr Wright's drawings or even take any photographs because I was a purist. I was [an] idealist. I was going to work from my own philosophy, and that's what he wanted apprentices to do, too: that wherever they went, they would contribute to the infinite variety of nature by being individual, creating for individuals a growing, changing thing. Well practically none of them were able to do it. I mean, I am one of two or three that may have done it, you know ...

Although his earlier works not surprisingly displayed some of the influence of his mentor, Lautner gradually developed his own style and consciously avoided anything that could be classified as "Wright-influenced". An exception among his later commissions to this was the Wolff House in West Hollywood (1963) which was often cited by his critics as a "Wrightian" building, much to his chagrin, but as he explained in 1986:

Yeah, that's what they have to grab on [to]. And that's a pain in the neck too, because the reason it is [Wrightian], is because the client, Wolff, asked for that. He wanted a Frank Lloyd Wright kind of house, and so I had to respect his request as a client. And that's the first and only time I did anything similar [to Wright]. And immediately everybody recognized it, and they think it's my best work, when it's the easiest. I could do those any time of the day or night. I could do a Frank Lloyd Wright house, but doing my own are more original.

Lautner's approach to architecture embodied many of Wright's philosophies and preoccupations, above all, the notion of a building as a "total concept". Like Wright, his work also shows a strong preoccupation with essential geometric forms -- the circle and the triangle are dominant motifs in both his overall designs and his detailing -- and his houses are similarly rooted in the idea of integrating the house into its location and creating an organic flow between indoor and outdoor spaces, although Lautner's work arguably took the latter concept to even greater heights.

Another point of similarity is that, like Wright, many of Lautner's houses were sited in elevated locations or 'difficult' sites -- hillsides or seashores -- and were expressly designed to take full advantage of the vistas these sites offered; he also followed Wright's dictum of building on a slope rather than on the very top of a hill.

Lautner's work is especially significant for its radical expansion of both the technical and spatial vocabulary of domestic architecture. He achieved this through his use of the latest building technologies and materials -- e.g. his pioneering use of glue-laminated plywood beams, steel beams and sheeting, and especially his ongoing exploration of the architectural possibilities of reinforced concrete -- and through his use of non-linear, open-plan and multi-level layouts, shaped and folded concrete forms, skylights and light-wells and panoramic expanses of plate glass. Another key characteristic of Lautner's architecture is his heterogeneous approach, not only in his overall concepts -- each Lautner building is a unique design solution -- but also in his use of materials, as Jean-Louis Cohen notes in his essay "John Lautner's Luxuriant Tectonics":

There is absolutely no dogma in Lautner's attitude to materials; as a result he never subordinates the design concept of his buildings to any rigid rule that would require the primacy of a single material in a project. Even where he demanded rigorous continuity and integrity, as with wood in the Walstrom House and concrete at Marbrisa ... he never allowed that to undermine the sense of structure and always took into account the need for a certain structural logic ... He was happy to bring together wood and concrete ... as he did in the Desert Hot Springs Motel ... to have cables meet concrete and plastic, as in the Tolstoy House, to carry a wooden roof on steel supports, as in the Garcia House, or, so evident in the Chemosphere, to allow three radically different materials to work with each other -- a structure of of laminated lumber to enclose the dwelling area, metal struts to carry it, those struts bolted onto the vertical concrete column that anchors the unit to the hill.

It is ironic that, although famous Lautner works like the Carling and Harpel houses, the Chemosphere and the Sheats-Goldstein Residence have become inextricably linked with Los Angeles in the public imagination, Lautner repeatedly expressed his dislike of California. In his oral history interviews he was highly critical of the standard of architecture in Los Angeles, and idealised the rural Michigan environment of his youth, as he recalled in 1986:

My childhood, I had a hundred miles of beaches, private beaches, you know: no people, no nothing. I mean, just go swimming anywhere you want, and no problem. The coast here to me is just ugly, you know, it's crazy. Malibu is nothing to me, it's just crazy." ... Oh it was depressing. I mean, when I first drove down Santa Monica Boulevard, it was so ugly I was physically sick for the first year I was here. Because after living in Arizona and Michigan and Wisconsin, mostly out in the country, and mostly with good architecture ... this was the ugliest thing I'd ever seen ... If you tried to figure out how to make a row of buildings ugly, you couldn't do it any better than it's been done [here]. I mean they're just ugly, naturally ugly, all the way. There isn't a single, legitimate, good-looking thing anywhere.

Major works

Foster Carling Residence
One of Lautner's most significant early works, this house embodies many of his central design concerns and includes key features that he would continue to explore and develop throughout his career. It was also important as the project that united him with builder John de la Vaux. Fortuitously, the pair met through their wives, who knew each other socially -- at the time, Lautner was having trouble finding contractors to work on his houses, and de la Vaux, a boat builder, was keen to move into housing construction. At his wife's suggestion de la Vaux approached Lautner and offered to build the Carling House, and they sealed the deal with a handshake. As de La Vaux recounted in the 2009 Lautner documentary, the project was briefly halted by a rare snowstorm that dumped more than six inches of snow on the Hollywood area. Lautner's design incorporates many innovative features: he used external steel cantilever beams to support the roof of the hexagonal main living area, creating a completely open space free of any internal supports, and the design and situation combine to afford 360-degree views across Los Angeles. Another striking feature is the movable wall-seat; one entire wall section of the living area (which has a built-in couch) is hinged on one side and supported by a castor on the other, allowing the entire structure to swing out, opening the room out to the adjoining terrace (an idea he revisited with the opening the Turner Residence in Aspen). There is also a pool which partly intrudes into the living area under a sheet of plate glass (a feature that he revisited to even greater effect in the Elrod House). The Carling House has become one Lautner's most celebrated designs and marked the beginning of his fruitful collaboration with de la Vaux through seven major projects including the famous "Chemosphere".

Googie
Although best known for his residential commissions, Lautner was also the reluctant founder of the commercial genre known as Googie architecture. Alan Hess, author of Googie: Fifties Coffeeshop Architecture traces the origins of the style to the three Coffee Dan's restaurants designed by Lautner in the early Forties. The term "Googie architecture" was reportedly coined ca. 1952 by Yale University professor Douglas Haskell after he spotted the Lautner-designed Googie's Coffee Shop while driving through Hollywood with renowned architectural photographer Julius Shulman. Haskell used the term as a nickname in a 1952 House and Home magazine article on the new design style and it stuck, although it soon came to be used as a derogatory term in 'serious' architectural circles.

Googie's Coffee Shop, designed in 1949, stood at the corner of Sunset Strip and Crescent Heights, next to the famous Schwab's Pharmacy; regrettably it was demolished in 1989. It was distinctive for its expansive glass walls, arresting angular form, and exuberant signage oriented to car traffic: an advertisement for itself. Another key Lautner work in the Googie 'genre' was Henry's Restaurant in Pomona; its vaulted roof, resembling an inverted boat hull, arched over the interior booths and the large exposed beams (made from glue-laminated timber) carried through to the exterior, where they supported a slatted awning that shaded the drive-in area. Other chains such as Tiny Naylor's, Ship's, Norm's and Clock's quickly imitated the look, which demonstrated its commercial value.

Googie became part of the American postwar Zeitgeist, but was ridiculed by the architectural community of the 1950s as superficial and vulgar. Not until Robert Venturi's 1972 book "Learning from Las Vegas" did the architectural mainstream even come close to validating Lautner's logic. The style was denigrated by East Coast critics and Lautner's reputation suffered; as a result he became wary of talking to the press and it is notable that his 1986 UCLA oral history interviews include no references at all to these early projects.

Harpel Residence
This elegant hillside house was designed and sited to take advantage of the panoramic views of Los Angeles. Unfortunately it was extensively altered by later owners, including an unsympathetic second storey addition and the planting of a large hedge beside the pool (which completely obscured the views it was meant to frame), but it has recently been faithfully restored by the present owner Marc Haddawy at a cost of over US$500,000[3].

The Chemosphere
(see main article: Chemosphere) Lautner's reputation was considerably restored by his groundbreaking design for the Leonard J. Malin Residence, also known as the "Chemosphere" (1960), which has become one of his best-known and most influential creations. Located at 776 Torreyson Drive, West Hollywood, the house was designed for young aerospace engineer Leonard Malin in 1960 and built by John de la Vaux. The steep hillside site had been given to Malin by his father-in-law but was considered impossible to build on until Lautner devised his design:

"The typical way to approach it would have been to bulldoze out a lot and put in 30-foot-high retaining walls to try to hold up the mountain, which is just insane."

Malin Residence ("The Chemosphere"),
Los Angeles (1960)

Lautner ingeniously solved the problem of the 45-degree slope by siting the entire house off the ground atop a 50-foot concrete pillar which rests on a massive concrete pad 20-feet in diameter and 3 feet thick, buried into the rocky hillside. Halfway up the pillar, eight angled steel 'spokes' (bolted onto bosses formed onto the surface of the column) splay out and up, supporting and stabilizing the outer rim of the house, and the center of the pillar also houses the utility cables and pipes. Lautner provided access from the driveway up the steep hillside by installing a funicular, which terminates at a short sloping gangway that leads up to the entrance. The house is octagonal in plan and lozenge-shape in section, and is often described as a "flying saucer". Since there are effectively no solid external walls -- the entire outer "face" of the house is comprised of eight large picture windows -- the Chemosphere enjoys a panoramic view over Hollywood. The massive radiating glu-lam roof bearers and crossbeams, which echo the keel and ribs of a ship hull, were built by de la Vaux using the same type of mortise joints he had used in his boat building.

Construction of the highly unusual project saw the initial $30,000 budget blow out to over $100,000, but fortunately Malin and Lautner were able to cover the shortfall by obtaining corporate sponsorship, including funding from the Southern California Gas Company and support from the Chemseal Corporation of America, who provided sealants, plastics and other materials, in return for use of the house for promotions and the right to name the house the "Chemosphere" for advertising purposes. After passing through a succession of owners, the building was rented out and occasionally used as a party venue and by the 1990s the interior was considerably degraded. Fortunately, German publisher Benedikt Taschen purchased the house in 2000 and restored it in collaboration with architects Frank Escher and Ravi Gunewardena, earning them an award from the Los Angeles Conservancy. The Chemosphere is a now Los Angeles landmark and in 2008 a panel of experts commissioned by the Los Angeles Times rated the Chemosphere as one of the "Top 10 houses of all time in L.A.". It is one of the most unusual and distinctive houses in the Los Angeles area and its unique design has led to it being featured or referenced in many media productions.

Reiner Residence ("Silvertop")
As his career developed Lautner increasingly explored the use of concrete and he designed a number of homes for his more affluent clients that featured major structural elements fabricated from reinforced concrete. the Reiner-Burchill Residence, "Silvertop" (1956), was his first major exploration of the sculptural possibilities of concrete, features a large arching concrete roof over the main house and an eye-catching curved concrete driveway that sweeps up and around the steep block. The project had a long and difficult gestation -- while it was still being built, original owner Kenneth Reiner was bankrupted by the fraudulent dealings of his business partners and he was forced to sell the house. Lautner also faced opposition from the Los Angeles building certification authorities, who were dismayed by the radical design of the post-stressed concrete ramp, which cantilivers out from the base of the house without any columns supporting it from beneath, and is only four inches thick. Not surprisingly, the L.A. building inspector demanded a static load test to prove that it could take the weight of a car -- a standoff that mirrored Lautner and Wright's earlier contretemps with skeptical building authorities who demanded load tests on Wright's famous "lotus pad" columns for the Johnson Wax Building. In the event, Lautner's load calculations proved flawless and in fact the instruments recorded more deflection in the concrete from the change in temperature when the sun went down than they did from the weight of the sandbags loaded onto the ramp to test it.

Elrod Residence
Arguably the most widely seen of Lautner's works, the Elrod House (1968) became famous through its use as a location in the Bond film Diamonds Are Forever. Sited on a commanding hillside location in the desert outside Palm Springs, California, its best-known feature is the large circular 'sunburst' concrete canopy which appears to float above the main living area; this area also incorporates a large natural rock outcrop at the edge of the room, creating the impression that the fabric of the building is fused with the rock. The canopy is fitted with curved glass-and-aluminium sliding doors that allow the space to be completely opened around half its circumference, opening out to a semi-circular swimming pool and a broad terrace. The prime hilltop site offers sweeping views of the surrounding desert.

Hope Residence
The 17,500 sq.ft. Bob and Dolores Hope Residence (1973), situated close to the Elrod Residence in Palm Springs, features a massive undulating triangular roof, pierced by a large circular central light shaft. The original house burned down during construction and Dolores Hope made extensive changes to the second design, with the result that Lautner eventually distanced himself from the project. Although not well-known and rarely available for public viewing (it is located within a gated community) it is one of the largest and most visually striking of Lautner's designs.

Arango Residence ("Marbrisa")
Arguably the pinnacle of Lautner's career and, the vast (25,000 sq.ft) "Marbrisa" in Acapulco was built for Mexican supermarket magnate Jeronimo Arango in 1973 and was jointly designed by Lautner and Helena Arahuete during her first year with the firm. Perched on a hilltop site, with uninterrupted views across the whole of Acapulco Bay, the main living quarters are surmounted by a large open terrace with spectacular views of the beach and bay, encircled by a "sky moat" which snakes around its edge; the terrace is itself topped by a huge, sweeping semi-circular angled 'shade' made of poured concrete.

Lost works

Several significant Lautner building have since been destroyed or irrevocably altered:

• Googie's Coffee Shop was demolished in 1989 and replaced by a mini-mall

• all the Coffee Dan's and Henry's restaurants have been demolished; the last Henry's was demolished in the 1980s

• the Bick Residence in Brentwood was demolished in 1990

• the Concannon Residence in Beverly Hills passed through several hands before being purchased by James Goldstein (owner of the neighbouring Sheats-Goldstein Residence), who demolished it in 2002 to build a tennis court

• the Nouard Gootgeld Residence, 1167 Summit Drive, Beverly Hills (1952) was jointly built by Lautner and Gootgeld. The property was purchased by Priscilla Presley in 1974, stripped down to its structural beams and converted into a large Italianate villa

Cultural impact and legacy

Several of Lautner's houses are now designated as Loas Angeles Cultural-Historical Monuments. His dramatic and photogenic spaces have been frequently used as film, TV and photography locations and they have also influenced movie production and set design.

• the Elrod Residence was the location for the well-known sequence in the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever in which Bond battles female assassins "Bambi" and "Thumper"

• the Chemosphere has been used several times as a film or TV location, including The Outer Limits (1964) and Brian De Palma's Body Double (1984). The design is also directly referenced in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and the movie Charlie's Angels and it was parodied (as Troy McClure's house) in an episode of The Simpsons. It is also thought to have influenced the design of the space-age stilt houses in the animated sitcom The Jetsons, which premiered two years after the house was built, and it closely resembles the design of the "Jupiter II" spacecraft in the sci-fi seriesLost In Space. An exact copy of the Chemosphere interior is used as the set for Current TV.

• the Sheats-Goldstein Residence in Beverly Hills has featured in The Big Lebowski, Bandits and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and is a sought-after location for fashion photo shoots

• the Garcia House ("Rainbow") in West Hollywood featured in Lethal Weapon 2

• the famous "car cafe" set created for the Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction was explicitly modelled on well-known examples of the Googie style, including Lautner's Googie diner (which was boarded up but still standing when the film as made) and Henry's Restaurant in Glendale.

• for the Iron Man movies, production designer Michael Riva and concept artist Phil Saunders based the design of Tony Stark's mansion on Lautner's architecture. The exteriors of the building (a series of computer-generated images which were digitally composited into location photos of Point Dume State Preserve in Malibu) are strongly reminiscent of Silvertop and Marbrisa, fancifully blending many of Lautner's 'signature' elements including the dramatic cliff-side location, large expanses of glass, classic "California split-level" layout and sinuous, organic lines.

Lautner also designed a home on Malibu's Carbon Beach, at one time owned by David Arquette and Courteney Cox, which sold for US$33.5 million.

One of the few Lautner buildings regularly open to the general public is the Desert Hot Springs Motel, which was restored in 2001. The Bob Hope residence was made available for limited museum-sponsored public visits during 2008-2009.

In 2008 Lautner's life and work was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Reviewing the exhibition, author and critic Hunter Drohojowska-Philp lauded Lautner's work:

If ever there was an architect who deserved a show in an art museum, it is John Lautner. With the sweeping curves in space and the rhythm of repeated forms, his buildings stand as functional sculpture. They are unique entities unlike those of any other architect.

In 2009 the Googie Company released the documentary feature film Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner, directed by Murray Grigor. It features extensive contemporary and archival images of many of Lautner's key buildings (most of which are not open to the public), excerpts from Lautner's 1986 oral history recordings, interviews with Lautner's family, colleagues and clients, Lautner archivist Frank Escher and longtime Lautner fan Frank Gehry, as well as a moving on-site reunion of the three surviving principals who built the Chemosphere -- Lautner's assistant Guy Zebert, original owner Leonard Malin, and builder John de la Vaux (who was 95 years old at the time of filming).

Lautner's legacy is now curated and perpetuated by the non-profit John Lautner Foundation. In 2007 the Foundation donated its archive of drawings, models, photographs, and other materials that belonged to John Lautner to the Getty Museum Special Collections.

Honors

• Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, 1970
• Architectural Record Award for Excellence, 1971
• Distinguished Alumni Award, Northern Michigan University, 1975
• Architectural Record Award for Excellence, 1977
• Cody Award, 1980
• Los Angeles chapter, American Institute of Architects, Man of the Year, 1980
• Olympic Architect, 1984

Major completed projects by design date

1939

• John Lautner Residence, 2007 Micheltorena Street, Los Angeles, California

1940

• Norman Springer Cottage, Echo Park, Los Angeles, CA.
• Bell Residence, 7714 Woodrow Wilson Drive, West Hollywood

1945

• Darrow Office Building, Beverly Hills, CA. - with Douglas Honnold (interior later altered)
• Edgar and Allison Mauer House, 932 Rome Drive, Los Angeles CA. (L.A. Cultural Monument No. 481)
• Hancock Residence, Silver Lake, CA. - with Douglas Honnold

1946

• Coffee Dan's (Wilshire, Vine St, Broadway and Hollywood) - with Douglas Honnold (all later demolished)
• Arthur Eisele Guest House, Los Angeles CA

1947

• Foster Carling House, 7144 Hockey Trail, Los Angeles CA
• Desert Hot Springs Motel, Desert Hot Springs, California, 33°56.31′N 116°28.83′W
• Henry's Restaurant, Glendale, California (demolished 1980)
• Florence Polin House, 3542 Multiview Drive, Hollywood CA
• Jacobsen Residence, 3544 Multiview Drive, Hollywood CA
• W. F. and Dorothy Gantvoort House, 3778 Hampstead Road, La Canada Flintridge CA
• Tower Motors Lincoln Mercury Showroom (later demolished)

1948

• Sheats Apartments ("L'Horizon"), Westwood, California (L.A. Cultural Monument No. 367)
• Valley Escrow Offices, Sherman Oaks, CA. (demolished)

1949

• UPA Studios, Burbank, California
• Grant Dahlstrom House, 780 Laguna Road, Pasadena CA
• Schaffer Residence, 527 Whiting Woods Road, Glendale CA
• Googie's Coffee House, cnr Sunset and

1950

• Leo M. and Lena Harvey Residence, aka the Harvey Aluminum House, 2180 West Live Oak Drive, Los Feliz, Los Angeles CA. (restored 2001 by Helena Arahuete)
• Louise Foster House, Sherman Oaks, California
• Shusett House, Beverly Hills, California (extensively altered)
• Lawrence E. Deutsch Residence, Los Angeles CA

1951

• George and Grace F. Alexander House, 5281 East El Roble Street, Long Beach CA

• Baxter-Hodiak Residence (remodel), 8650 Pine Tree Place, Los Angeles CA
• [[Bick Residence], Brentwood, CA. (demolished 1990)

1952

• Nouard Gootgeld Residence, 1167 Summit Drive, Beverly Hills (altered beyond recognition, 1980s)
• Howe Residence, Los Angeles CA
• Fern Carr Residence remodel, Los Angeles CA (later extensively altered)
• Harry A. Williams Residence, 3329 Ledgewood Drive, Los Angeles CA

1953

• Ted Bergren Residence, 7316 Caverna Drive, Los Angeles CA (burned down in late '50s, rebuilt by Lautner with addition)
• Henry's Restaurant, Pasadena, CA. (demolished 1979)

• Tyler Residence, 3612 Woodhill Canyon Road, Studio City CA
• Howe Residence, Los Angeles CA

1954

• Beachwood Market, Los Angeles (remodel)
• Coneco Corporation House, Sherman Oaks CA
• Fischer House, Los Angeles CA.

1955

• Baldwin House, Los Angeles CA

1956

• Reiner-Burchill Residence, aka "Silvertop", 2138 Micheltorena Street, Los Angeles CA
• Speer Contractors Office Building, Los Angeles
• Kaynar Factory, Pico Rivera, CA.
• Willis Harpel Residence 1, 7764 West Torreyson Drive, Los Angeles CA (extensively altered by later owners, restored 2006)
• Stanley Johnson Residence, Laguna Beach CA

1957

• Paul Zahn Residence, 2880 Hollyridge Drive, Los Angeles CA
• Henry's Restaurant, Pomona, California (demolished 1987)
• Carl and Agnes Pearlman Cabin, 52820 Middle Ridge Drive, Idyllwild, California
• Ernest S. and Mildred Lautner House (aka the Round House), 539 El Cerrito Place, Pensacola, Florida

1958

• George Hatherall House, 10160 Maude Avenue, Shadow Hills, California (extensively remodeled)
• Russ Garcia House, aka "Rainbow", 7436 Mulholland Drive, West Hollywood, CA.
• Iwerks House, Sherman Oaks CA (later remodeled by Tracy Stone)
• Leonard J. Malin Residence, aka "Chemosphere", 776 Torreyson Drive, West Hollywood, CA (LA Historic-Cultural Monument No. 785)

1960

• Concannon Residence, Angelo View Drive, Beverly Hills CA (demolished 2002)
• Midtown School, Los Angeles (L.A. His­to­ric Cul­tu­ral Mo­nu­ment 553)

1961

• Ann and Peter Tolstoy House, Hillside Road, Rancho Cucamonga, CA.
• Marco Wolff Residence, 8530 Hedges Place, West Hollywood CA.

1962

• Paul and Helen Sheats House, aka Sheats-Goldstein House, 10104 Angelo View Drive, Beverly Hills CA (remodeled and extended 1989-)

1965

• Wayne Zimmerman Residence, Studio City, California

1966

• Willis Harpel House #2, Stanford Drive, Anchorage, Alaska
• Marina View Heights Headquarters Building, San Juan Capistrano, California

1968

• Dan Stevens Residence, 23524 Malibu Colony Road, Malibu, California
• Arthur Elrod House, 2175 Southridge Drive, Palm Springs, California
• Marco Wolff Mountain Cabin (remodel), aka "Windsong", 48700 Twin Pines Road, Banning California

1969

• Douglas and Octavia Walstrom House, 10500 Selkirk Lane, Los Angeles CA

1970

• Garwood Residence, Malibu CA.

1971

• Gary and Elizabeth Familian House, 1011 Cove Way, Beverly Hills CA

1972

• Stephen (Steve) R. and Audrey Bosustow Cabin, Lake Almanor, Chester, CA.

1973

• Bob and Dolores Hope Residence, Southridge Drive, Palm Springs, California
• Johanna and William Jordan House, 1617 Emerald Bay, Laguna Beach, California

• Jeronimo Arango House, aka Casa Marbrisa, Acapulco, Mexico, 16°49.36′N 99°51.41′W

1975

• Beyer Residence, Malibu, CA.

1978

• Robert and Marjorie Rawlins Residence, 804 South Bayfront, Newport Beach CA.

1979

• Rancho de Valle, Crippled Children's Society Rehabilitation Center, Woodland Hills, California
• Joann and Gilbert (Gil) Segel Residence, 22426 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, California

1981

• Schwimmer House, Beverly Hills

1982

• Allan Turner and Jude Risk-Turner Residence, 51 Heather Lane, Aspen, Colorado
• Alden Schwimmer Residence, 1435 Bella Drive, Beverly Hills CA

1983

• Krause House, 24444 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu CA
• Shirlin and Stanley Beyer Residence, 6515 Point Lechuza, Malibu CA (commissioned 1975)

1990

• Levy Residence (aka "the Concrete Castle", "the Pacific Coast house", "the Concrete Contemporary"), 32402 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu CA

1992

• Shearing House, 15 Green Turtle Road, Coronado Cays, Coronado CA

External links

• Official John Lautner website
• Responsibility, Infinity, Nature - transcript of 1986 oral history interview with Lautner by Marlene L. Laskey for the UCLA Oral History Program
• John Lautner, Architect by Betsy Speicher
• Pacific Coast Architecture Database - John Lautner
• Googie Architecture Online
• The JOHN LAUTNER resources page - site currently inactivate (May 2010)
• ADAO - International Web Portal of Organic Architecture
• Triangle Modernist Houses: John Lautner - extensive photo archive with interior and exterior shots of many of Lautner's domestic commissions, including rare photos of the Bop Hope residence in Palm Springs
• "John Lautner's Dazzlers Designed for Daily Living" - Wall Street Journal article by David Littlejohn
• "John Lautner's Harpel house, restored in fine style" - Los Angeles Times photogallery showcasing recent restoration of Lautner's Harpel House