Lautner, John

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Lautner, John (1911–94). American architect, a pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright (1933–9). He established his own practice in Los Angeles, designing some remarkably original private houses, including the Arango House, Acapulco, Mexico, of 1973 (where terraces exploit the views over the bay below), and the Sheats Goldstein House, Beverley Hills, CA, of 1960–3 (which seems to grow out of the rocks and is covered with a massive folded concrete roof). Perhaps his best-known buildings are the Malin House, or ‘Chemosphere’, Torreyson Drive, Los Angeles (1960), with the entire structure carried on one pier, and the Elrod House, Palm Springs (1968), with a concrete wheel-like roof of massive ‘spokes’ framing wedge-shaped windows. Esther McCoy called him a ‘lyrical technologist’.

Bibliography

Emanuel (1994);
Escher (1994);
Gössel (ed.) (1999, 2002);
Hess (2000)

A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

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Lautner, John

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