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Between Earth and Heaven

The Lighthouse, Scotland’s National Architecture and Design Centre, is currently staging the only European showing of Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner, as part of its 10th anniversary season.

The exhibition, devised by the Hammer Museum, LA and curated by Nicholas Olsberg and Frank Escher, draws on the substantial Lautner archive held by The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. It features rarely seen original drawings and plans, six 1”: 1’ models (created for the show) and seven specially commissioned videos of Lautner houses by British film maker, Murray Grigor. The exhibition, which spreads over two galleries, runs from 20 March – 26 July 2009. A series of events, including special screenings of Murray Grigor’s 90-minute documentary on the life and work of John Lautner, will complement the exhibition.

John Lautner’s work is about the power of architecture to awake the senses - how space can be shaped to excite awareness of light, movement, and vista within a building and evoke a feeling for the landscape, distances, and horizons beyond it. To do that, Lautner pioneered, long before their time, fluid and plastic approaches to built form that stretched structure and materials to their limits. Though his last major works were designed in the early 1980s, and his innovations go back to 1946, they continue to startle with the freedom and variety of their forms and plans, their structural originality and their sculptural force.

Like any significant body of work, Lautner’s follows a complicated path. Its turns and junctures derive from the changing practical conditions of his commissions, and they are advanced by developments in his internal thinking; but they also respond to powerful shifts in the dominant discourse of the day. His major built works cannot be divorced from the specific landscapes to which they react and which they do so much to shape. But at the same time, they always turn one facet outward to capture and cast reflections of a much wider discussion, particularly on domestic space and on the structural dimension of architecture.

Marbrisa. Image courtesy of Hammer

“I have designed from within all my life. Within is the real essential of architecture, because the central use of architecture is for people….. One of the main ideas is to improve human life by creating truth and beauty and infinite space.”
John Lautner

Born in 1911 the “maverick” architect, John Lautner, was raised in Marquette, Michigan where at the age of 12 he helped his mother and father build Midgaard (between earth and heaven), a wooden cabin on the shores of the lake. In 1932 he joined Frank Lloyd Wright as one the first group of Taliesin Fellows. Lautner had been attracted to Lloyd Wright’s apprentice training by its marked contrast to the academic world - in a typical architecture school Lautner felt he would be graded for neat draftsmanship, which was never his forte, rather than ideas. “Frank Lloyd Wright accented that you don’t make sketches, you have to have an idea, and when you have an idea then you can put it down. That’s how I worked all my life.”

Having completed his training Lautner stayed on in Taliesin, eventually leaving to work on a Lloyd Wright house in LA. His initial reaction to the city was not positive. “I had been used to everything beautiful and here everything was ugly,” and yet it was in this ugly city that he was to work for the rest of his life. Although he hated the city he knew he had to be in a place like LA to get the kind of innovative, imaginative clients who would hire him.

Most of the Lautner houses are timeless, because of the way there were designed,” says Guy Zerbert, who worked as project architect with Lautner on over 30 major projects including the Malin House. “They were designed taking the site into consideration, which was most important, and the original owner. When someone went to John they knew they were not going to get something ordinary, but something very special.”

It is in the relationship of architecture to site that is found a unity in Lautner’s disparate designs. When my father would get a new client he would get a topo of the property, of the contours, and go up to the site,” says Lautner’s daughter Judith in Grigor’s documentary. “He would take a soft pencil and would mark all the aspects of the property that he could perceive whilst he was on the site. He would walk around and discover interesting rocks or plants or where the wind was, if there was an unusual view, and he would mark it on the topo. Then he would come back to the office and sit staring at it. He could sit for days thinking and then one day he would suddenly have the idea in his head, and he would take his pencil and scribble rough plans and sections, and jot notes over it. That is what he would hand it to the draftsman.”

Image: Chemosphere by Joshua White

“Lautner never thought of his buildings as objects in a landscape. It is always about the architectural space and how that relates to the landscape, “ says exhibition curator, Frank Escher. “He was accused of doing arbitrary forms, but over a career spanning nearly 50 years he developed a level of precision in framing the view and directing the eye to the horizon. I can’t think of any house other than Marbisa that has such a connection between space and the world, between form and construction. Here there is movement through space, and the space is anchored to the site. You are grounded on this and then look out onto the world. Mar Brisa is his masterpiece - not just one his best houses, but one of the most extraordinary houses of the 20th century.”

“As the architecture of domestic space seems poised to enter a new cycle of invention— after many years of stagnation—Lautner’s work has a new relevance, for it manages to free the imagination without abandoning any of its rationality. Far from being—as they have sometimes been portrayed—startling but hollow exercises in architectural sculpture, his houses remain what he intended them to be: spaces in which life is enriched by the unique architectural idea that animates them.”

The exhibition is arranged chronologically starting with the early works from his emerging practice in the 1940s leading through the most fertile period in the late ‘50s and the 60s to the last great work, the Turner House in Aspen (1982). The evolution of Lautner’s work is traced by the first comprehensive presentation of his drawings, sketches, studies and notes, along with six large-scale models and a series of videos (films!), that capture movement through the buildings and sites, showing the flow of internal space, the changing light and shifting palette and texture of the form.

Image: Stefanie Keenan

Six key projects covering a range of time and radically different settings and scales, are examined in depth. These are: the Pearlman cabin, Idyllwild, (1957); the Chemosphere, also known as the Malin House, Los Angeles, (1960); the Elrod house, Palm Springs, (1968); the Walstrom house, Los Angeles, (1969); Marbrisa in Acapulco (1973); the Turner house in the meadows of Aspen (1982).

For each project rarely or never-before-seen drawings and study models from the Lautner archive are presented alongside a specially-fabricated model, moving images, and evocations of the landscape to which it speaks.

Ten significant built works - including the Sheats Apartments, the Midtown School, and the Schaeffer, Silvertop, Wolff, Garcia, Sheats-Goldstein, Familian, and Beyer houses - along with a number of unrealised projects, are presented via archival materials, showing how the ideas for the buildings were developed and unique solutions for each site and setting generated.

A further 25 other critical projects, (built and unbuilt), are also referred to in the exhibition. They demonstrate the evolution of Lautner’s approach, especially as it matured in the 40s and 50s, when the range of his projects for Los Angeles was vast – from drive-ins and film studios to small houses on unbuildable hillside lots .

A hard-back, 118-page, full colour catalogue accompanying the exhibition is edited by Nicholas Olsberg with contributions from Jean-Louis Cohen and Frank Escher. It is available from The Lighthouse Shop or on-line via www.theligthouse.co.uk/shop

The European showing of Between Heaven and Earth: The Architecture of John Lautner, has been made possible by generous support from Dunard Fund and Dunard Fund USA.

Image: Stefanie Keenan

20 March – 26 July 2009
Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner
Galleries 4 & 5 - The Lighthouse, 11 Mitchell Lane, Glasgow, G1
Opening Hours
The Lighthouse, 11 Mitchell Lane, Glasgow is open Monday and Wednesday - Saturday: 10.30am – 5pm; Tuesday 11am – 5pm; Sunday 12 noon – 5pm Individual tickets giving access to all areas of the building are priced £4 adults, £2 concessions and £1.50 children (family and group discounts also available).
Free on Saturdays

29 March 2009 at 5.15pm
Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner
Glasgow Film Theatre
2 Rose Street, Glasgow G3 6RB
Box Office: +44 (0)141 332 8128

Screening of Murray Grigor’s documentary on the life and work of John Lautner. Features archive recordings of Launter talking about his life and work alongside interviews with previous and current owners of Lautner houses; architects and builders he worked with and whom he inspired, notably Frank Gehry, and Lautner’s two daughters Judith and Karol.