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.