His German-born father, John, taught college philosophy and introduced Lautner to Nietzsche and Kant and to George Santayana's belief in harmony with the environment. His mother, Cathleen, an artist influenced by Gauguin, the Fauvists and Nordic myth, took the name Vida.
At a time when people still believed in the power of a home to shape character, even destiny, Lautner and his family built a mystical second home on Lake Superior. Lautner laid floors and raised beams for the log-framed roof. His mother studied Norwegian folk architecture to create a "Norse cabin" she called "Midgaard," envisioning its architecture as summoning a mystical realm, as she said, "midway between earth and heaven."
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.
This view of a house as a bridge to the natural world endured for the rest of Lautner's life.
In the early 1930s, he and his first wife, Mary Roberts, enrolled in Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship. Lautner evolved from Wright apprentice to collaborator, and the relationship continued when Lautner moved to Los Angeles in 1938.
Lautner built his own house in 1940 at the top of the roller-coaster Micheltorena hill in Silver Lake and had four children. He opened an architectural firm and fell in love with the wife of a partner, Elizabeth Honnold, soon his second wife.
Misperception dogged him early. He designed a Googie's diner at Sunset and Crescent Heights in 1947 with a high glass front so patrons could experience the vast sky, and "he was treated as if he had created Denny's," says his daughter Judith Lautner, who worked with her father for seven years. But that perception "was the opposite of everything he stood for. He did what he did at Googie's to bring the outside in."
"The Googie debacle was essentially a betrayal," the Hammer's Philbin wrote in an e-mail. "Two East Coast critics said they admired it, then [Lautner] found it published as a caution and a warning -- an example of the sort of Movieland exuberance that good Modernists should eschew."
The Bond house
LAUTNER found a respite among postwar middle-class clients -- aerospace workers, doctors, even a descendant of Tolstoy -- who fueled a boom in the unique residential architecture that is often a refuge for cutting-edge architects.
