Ann Philbin, the adventurous director of the Hammer, says the genesis of the exhibition goes back to her arrival in Los Angeles nine years ago, when she discovered Lautner to be "hugely deserving and overlooked" and "underrepresented in the pantheon of 20th century architecture."
Philbin credits Lautner with "moving away from the cool, the functional and the rational tenets of Modernism toward something more sensual and transcendent. . . . I don't think it is too large a claim, in fact, to say that he is the link between Modernist architects like Neutra and Schindler and architects like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid."
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.
Views from on high
ON A recent day at the Hammer, co-curator Frank Escher, of Escher GuneWardena Architecture, stood amid wooden crates as workmen delicately placed the elliptical top of a model of the mushroom-like Chemosphere on its podium.
Viewers must understand, Escher said, that as intriguing as Lautner houses seem from the outside, "they're designed as observatories."
"The whole idea is giving you a sheltered place to look out onto nature," said Escher, whose Clark Kent glasses do little to disguise his passionate intensity.
Escher got to know Lautner when he worked on the restoration of the Chemosphere. It is one of 16 buildings, six of them unusually large-scale models, that appear in the exhibition.
"Lautner used the space to connect to the landscape," Escher said. "It didn't matter if it was a tiny mountain cabin or it overlooked Acapulco Bay. Lautner brought the landscape in. He pushed architecture in a new direction in the second half of the 20th century."
Lautner loved to hate Los Angeles. He once said the city was "so ugly it made me physically sick."
Yet "he understood this was the only place he could develop his work," Escher said. "He knew that yes, this was an ugly city. But there was this incredible richness of utopian, intellectual, interesting people, as open to invention as he was. He would not have been able to do this without his clients."
One was a 27-year-old aerospace engineer, Leonard Malin. Lautner climbed Malin's "virtually impossible-precipitous-hillside" day and night, sitting in the scrub for hours, watching the light change and the city lights emerge from the darkness, Malin recalled in a tribute issue of the Journal of the Taliesin Fellows of Frank Lloyd Wright.
