The spirit of invention

THIS may be John Lautner's year.

Long overshadowed by modernist contemporaries Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, Lautner (1911-94) and the homes he built here in Southern California are set to receive unprecedented attention, starting with the publication this month of "Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner," written and edited by historian Nicholas Olsberg, with additional chapters by New York University professor Jean-Louis Cohen and L.A. architect Frank Escher, who worked on Lautner's first monograph. The book, which will hit stores April 22, is published by Rizzoli in conjunction with the Hammer Museum, whose related exhibition will open July 13.

The book and show detail how Lautner built his legacy in a city he despised, once calling Los Angeles "so ugly it made me physically sick." He stayed here only because the technologies of the aerospace and military industries had established a culture of innovation. Wealthy residents were willing to take risks and experiment, even when it came to something as elemental as their homes.

The architect wasn't -- and still isn't -- held in high regard among certain critics, who see his homes as symbols of L.A. excess. "If you're going to run the risks he did and build what Frank Lloyd Wright called exuberance and others called vulgarities, you're going to build some mistakes," Olsberg said by phone from his home in Patagonia, Ariz. But even those mistakes are part of Lautner's biggest legacy in Southern California, a spirit of invention. "That's what is amazing," Olsberg said. "There are clients and architects willing to run risks like nowhere else. That's why Lautner stayed."

In the forthcoming book, Olsberg details the architect's childhood influences, his cantankerous and sometimes self-destructive personality, and the genius of his work: a sense of freedom that one feels upon entering Lautner's best houses -- "a form and spatial experience so ravishing," Olsberg said, "it brings you to tears -- to walk in and have the world open up."

An excerpt adapted from Olsberg's work in "Between Earth and Heaven":

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IN 1973 a major Lautner exhibition traveled across Europe. Uneasy over the purported exclusiveness of his work, the organizers suddenly adapted this retrospective and presented him alongside perfectly forgettable Los Angeles work, none of it bearing the slightest relationship to Lautner's ideas. As a result, the critical essays in the catalogue focused on precisely what Lautner was not: avatar of a casual, disorderly, sprawling city of gaudy neon and cheap symbolism.