Lautner was collaborative, in a way today's ego-fed celebrity "starchitects" might not comprehend. Malin chose the house Lautner eventually built from four designs. He dubbed the floating "hemispherical" home the "Chemosphere," after the "space-age" bonding and sealing compounds of Chem-Seal Corp. that were used in its construction.
One of Malin's colleagues, aerospace engineer Douglas Walstrom, visited the Chemosphere with his wife, Octavia, whom he had met when they both worked at NASA. She was blown away. Sitting in the Chemosphere, "you looked out over the mountains and experienced a very unique feeling," she says.
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.
The Walstroms had a steep half-acre in Beverly Glen. The 6-foot-4 Lautner scrambled up their hillside and "just stood there and looked at the mountains and smiled," she says. "He was a great nature lover."
Lautner showed the Walstroms three designs and told them to go with their gut feeling. The multi-level cabin they picked encountered so much official resistance that Octavia Walstrom finally demanded the permit herself.
Her reward, in 1969, was a utopian 1,400-square-foot haven with a central ceiling that soared 18 feet, stairs that seemed to float, and glass walls and passageways that wrapped the woodlands around and even under the house.
"We looked to the mountains and the trees," she says. "It was just like being in the woods. The deer came right up to the house. You're just part of nature and everything around you."
Now she's 90, and the place is pristine, thanks to a meticulous attention to engineering designed to withstand a magnitude-8 earthquake. She's still channeling the cabin's metaphysical bond with nature.
"We have coyotes coming around," she says. "Raccoons chewed up my water hose a couple of nights ago, so I put out a big pan of water for them."
Walstrom doubts that wealthy people buying up Lautner houses today as trophy homes, vacation places and party pads experience them as Lautner envisioned. But she appreciates efforts to restore their original integrity.
"Credit is due to the trophy people because they do have the money to take off the damage," she says. "Some people just can't leave a good design alone.
"He was an absolute genius, and the irony is he never made much money while he was alive."
Nature concepts came early
LAUTNER'S linkage of architecture to the natural world began in his childhood in the lakeside woodlands of Marquette, Mich. He was born July 16, 1911, into a hothouse of bohemian intellectual romanticism.
