Visual arts review: Between Heaven and Earth - the architecture of John Lautner

Published on Monday 20 July 2009 19:00

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH: THE ARCHITECTURE OF JOHN LAUTNER **** THE LIGHTHOUSE, GLASGOW

WHEN John Lautner was 12, he helped his parents build a cabin on the shores of Lake Superior. They called it Midgaard, the name given in Norse mythology to the place between heaven and earth where dwells mankind.

More than 30 years later in 1957, Lautner built another cabin, the Pearlmountain Cabin in the Idyllwild Arts Colony on the slope of Mount San Jacinto in California. He had a narrow shelf of sloping land with an immense boulder embedded in it and a client who wanted a haven to listen to music while looking at the alpine landscape.

For a whole day, Lautner – by then an architect at the height of his powers – sat on the boulder imagining the building take shape, a curved glass wall open to the forest with stripped tree trunks for supports balancing a darker, cosier area to the rear.

Lautner's buildings vary greatly, but most balance these contrasts: to be both open and private, both sheltered and visionary, both grounded and inspiring. It seems he never gave up his pursuit of Midgaard, the place between heaven and earth.

Lautner, who died in 1994, was an architectural prophet in the deserts of Southern California in the 1950s and 1960s whose influence can be seen in the work of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas. This major retrospective of his work, curated by Nicholas Olsberg and Frank Escher for the Hammer Museum in LA, gets its only European show in Glasgow, something of a coup for the Lighthouse in its tenth anniversary year.

It surveys his work through 40 projects, thoughtfully arranged by theme and chronology. The material includes rarely seen drawings and plans (when it came to drawing, Lautner's emphasis was on concept not precision), specially constructed scale models and photographs. Films of seven Lautner buildings by Scottish filmmaker Murray Grigor help to bring them to life.

Lautner trained with Frank Lloyd Wright, one of his first group of Taleisin Fellows. Keen to strike out on his own, he headed for LA, a city he didn't much like but which contained patrons with both money and a willingness to embrace the experimental end of modernism. By the time the 1950s came along, he was busy.

The majority of his buildings were private homes, often on challenging sites. He famously stood at the bottom of the hill on which he would build the Malin House (also known as Chemosphere, his most iconic building) on the north side of the ridge that divides LA from Hollywood, and declared there was no lot there on which to build. Then he began sketching an idea on the back of an envelope, a building freed from the hillside, supported on a central pillar.

It is tempting to describe the house as a space capsule, built as it was for aerospace engineer Leonard Malin. But to describe Lautner's work as futuristic is to misunderstand its driving concerns. Daring and concept-driven though his buildings were, his chief motivation was to create ideal human living spaces in harmony with the external environment.

His buildings were not so much structures placed in a landscape as attempts to sculpt space, always with an intense awareness of the precise topography around them. Boulders and even trees were not removed but incorporated. The house would be, in Lautner's words, "another form of nature".

"One of the main ideas," he said, "is to improve human life by creating truth and beauty and infinite space."

At the Elrod House, on a rocky spur above the desert resort of Palm Springs, he excavated into the mountain so that the boulders became an internal feature. A long mechanised window section can be opened at the push of a button, but the most iconic part of the house is its roof of tilted concrete blades, recognisable to many from Sean Connery's showdown with two villains in Diamonds are Forever.

A tendency to cast Lautner houses as the homes of villains and drug dealers in movies such as Charlie's Angels, Lethal Weapon 2 and The Big Lebowski has done the architect few favours. Thus these visionary buildings are in danger of becoming symbols of tasteless excess, rather than carefully crafted homes designed to enhance human life.

Luxury and vision seem to combine in Marbrisa, the house considered to be Lautner's masterpiece, overlooking the bay in Acapulco, Mexico. Built in 1973 in the shape of part of an inverted cone (all Lautner's houses have their own distinct geometry), and bordered by a "swimming channel", it seems to mould itself into the hillside, poised between heaven and earth.

However, Lautner did not only build luxury homes for private clients. As a social visionary, his range was always broader. In the 1940s, he was one of the first to recognise the potentially alienating qualities of a car-dominated city, and he designed a series of roadside diners in LA, though few of these survive today. The postwar need for affordable homes inspired schemes like L'Horizon apartments, an innovative series of circular capsules, now protected as a historical monument.

His last major house was the Turner House in Aspen, Colorado, in 1982, in which the distinction between the building and its environment almost disappears. Designed to look like "a snowdrift in winter and grass mound in summer", its simple curved concrete roof looks like part of a buried sphere beginning to rise from the earth.

From a 21st century perspective, two things are amazing about Lautner: that so many of his buildings were made, however strange and visionary they must have appeared at the time, and that so many survive today. The show's accompanying booklet, and Grigor's films, depict houses which are loved, looked after and, most importantly, lived in, a fitting tribute for an architect whose priorities were always with the human dimension.

&#149 Until 26 July