FEW GRASPED how John Lautner used architecture to embrace the natural world.
He opened a Sunset Boulevard diner to the sky and was dismayed to see it become a symbol of "Googie" Atomic Age design. His flying saucer-shaped Chemosphere residence, conceived to immerse residents in sweeping mountain and city views, became emblematic of the bachelor-pad Hollywood Modernism he rejected. Movies sensationalized his creations as James Bond-style backdrops for sex machines and lethally bored rich kids.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, July 20, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 31 words Type of Material: Correction
Hammer admission: A list accompanying an article in the July 13 Arts & Music section about the John Lautner exhibition at the Hammer Museum said admission was $5. It is $7.
Yet Lautner knew that Los Angeles, with its unfettered dreamers, schemers, experimenters and individualists, was the only place his visionary architectural drawings could become realities.
"Dream House or Nightmare?" a Norman Rockwell-era Saturday Evening Post asked of Silvertop, a Silver Lake Lautner residence seemingly poised to "zoom off to Mars."
Lautner did aim for altitude. One day in 1963, he walked out onto a Bel-Air cliff-top construction site and stood so perilously close to the edge that he was in danger of falling prey to a stray gust, to gravity itself. Yet he was calm, meditating on skyline and cityscape, like a stone angel on the parapet of a European opera house reaching for the gods. He seemed to embody his contention that "the purpose of architecture is to create timeless, free, joyous spaces for all activities in life."
"Between Earth and Heaven," opening today at the Hammer Museum, traces Lautner's lifelong quest to transcend the boundaries between shelter and nature. It also attempts to redefine the legacy of a seminal architectural pioneer so profoundly misunderstood that it took the exhibition's co-curator, Nicholas Olsberg, three months to decide whether to get involved at all.
"I thought it was very difficult," Olsberg says. "The work had been misrepresented for so long, as sensational Space Age-ism, as Hollywood glamour. It was burdened with all these myths: It was vulgar, it was crass, it was drama, it was spectacle.
"But it wasn't about that. It was about trying to establish this transcendent relationship between man and his environment," Olsberg says. "You have this enormous man looking at the vastness of the world. It's the contradiction of being secure on the ground but your head is flying.
"My hesitancy was: Could we manage to remove it from its perception?" he says. "I finally said yes."
