John Lautner, at a remove

If there is a single big idea driving "Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner," which opened Sunday at the Hammer Museum, it's that Lautner needs to be rescued from his own hardened reputation. Most museum retrospectives begin with an effort to dust off or polish up the historical record. This one, at times, feels like a full-on rehabilitation campaign.

The curators, Frank Escher and Nicholas Olsberg, are determined to save Lautner from a range of stereotypes that, in their view, have almost entirely obscured the architect's real achievement. To begin with, there's the charge that Lautner, who was born in 1911 in Michigan, apprenticed at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship between the wars and died in Los Angeles in 1994, never managed to escape Wright's substantial shadow. There's also the idea -- a particularly stubborn and lazy one, in the curators' eyes -- that Lautner was obsessed in the latter stages of his career with producing houses, such as the famed Chemosphere in the Hollywood Hills, that were foremost Space Age wonders: flying-saucer residences, complete with rotating rooms and hidden control panels, that took their cues from science fiction and aerospace alike.

The curators locate the middle ground inherent in the show's title, in other words, somewhere between the "earth" of Wright's site-hugging organic design and the "heaven" of a futuristic architecture that looked not just to the sky but to outer space. For them, Lautner's body of work, far from lurching from Wright's embrace straight into orbit, is unusually coherent, especially for an architect whose career spanned seven decades. His consistent aim was to create spaces at once set solidly into the landscape and offering a bracing sense of the wider world.

That fluid combination of intimate and dramatic scale is what distinguishes Lautner's best houses. Each one is a cave with a view.

Early in the show, the curators give pride of place to a small sketch Lautner made in 1946 for a guesthouse in Los Angeles. It shows a roof seeming to emerge from the ground and then arcing like a rainbow over the main living area. Though the project was ultimately built to a different design, the sketch neatly sums up the idea that, from the earliest stages of his solo work, Lautner was envisioning a kind of architecture inspired by the forms of nature but achievable only with the help of sophisticated 20th century engineering.

An idea's time arrives