John Lautner

Today Jeanette and I were joined by our Coffee Gallery buddy Patty, at the Hammer Museum where we viewed "John Lautner: Between Earth and Heaven". I must admit, I went with considerable trepidation as there had been complaints about the exhibit by several Architectural Historian and Architect friends who I generally admire. Fortunately, I kept an open mind.

Some of the early reviews of this exhibit did not appreciate the fact that many construction drawings with details were presented. Our friend Patty who,has built her own modern house in Laguna, enjoyed these particularly and wished there had been MORE of them. As a person who practices the design of buildings himself, I believe this was one of the more educational Architectural exhibits I have ever seen. In the first place, something other than just the floor plans, elevations and renderings are shown. Virtually every kind of drawing that a Architect uses to express and form his ideas is shown in this exhibit. We have preliminary sketches that show just a germ of an idea forming. We have drawings that show the labor and the struggle in the Malin house of the attempt to find the form that fits a difficult site and the programmatic needs of the client. We have sections, details, presentation interiors, interior sketches, the underlaying drawings for perspectives where everything is worked out on grids before the final perspectives are drawn over them, renderings, and preliminary and final models. Most people have no idea that this kind of work ever goes into a building before it is built. This show for the first time, reveals to the public the dozens upon dozens of steps that are needed to get to a final set of drawings for a building.

There are snippy comments from some about the imitation masking tape used to in their view create a false impression that these drawings are in a Architects studio. They see this as some kind of falseness because the tape is not real, but held down by the plexiglass that protects the drawings. I never thought about it before, but when I draw my drawings they are taped down. The tape as I view them and make them is a part of my experience. When they do hang in my studio, I fold over the tape and pin it to the wall, so as a object related to my work, my drawings are always taped. They say that "Art is the lie that tells us the truth" here the lie of this false tape indeed tells us that these now priceless drawings were at one time things a human being made, in order to make something more. They are lies in that they are not functional, this I will admit, but they are lies that lead us to truth, and this should not be objectionable.

I always have fears when I go to Architectural exhibits. It is difficult to take a large scale three dimensional art form and show it off in a museum. In this case, the Hammer has done a WONDERFUL job. There are very large scale models of most of Mr. Lautner's more famous works that have been constructed so that a part of the building has been cut away and the museum wall in the distance has the viewscape one would see from the house mounted on it. You can stand and look through the model to the earth and sky as it would be in the house beyond. The house in your mind can be experienced in part. You can get differing angles and perspectives. These are the best done Architectural models in a museum I have ever seen and I was personally delighted, especially after the unhappy experience of models at the Schindler exhibit a decade ago at MOCA where hovering security guards kept anyone from getting any useful knowledge of the buildings from the models.

Near the models were playing film strips of the house in the model, walking up to and through the homes public spaces. The Hammer really has done a great deal to convey an experience of John Lautner's Architecture and short of building a mock up of a house as a exhibit, they have gone as far as anyone can go. This really is a superlative show.

OK I do have a couple quibbles, it's true. I'd have like to have seen something about Lautner in the context of his time, of his peers in the Taliesin Fellowship and his peers in Los Angeles Architecture of his time. I'd have liked some more delving into Lautner's work for Douglas Honnald on Coffee Shops and his pivotal Goggie's and Henry's. That work led to an entire generation of American public spaces and had more effect on American popular culture than the work of any other Architect of the Twentieth Century. It is true that academicians despise that work, but they do so unjustly and incorrectly. It was an important expression of American democratic and Architectural theory, and should be explored more deeply. John Lautner was the founder of that expression, and its best single practitioner.

Finally, my last, but perhaps most important quibble, is that there is no examination of John Lautner as a man. I was very fortunate to know John during the last decade and a half of his life. I knew many of his employees and clients. John was a very demanding boss who had the highest standards for his employees, but who was kind, attentive and generous with them. He was a doting and concerned mentor of anyone who he recognized "had it"and went out of his way with students and younger members of the profession to help them see and think Architecturally.

John's students and employees were not, as Frank Lloyd Wright's employees and apprentices had been, and as employees in Architects offices often are, little more than slaves. John treated his employees as if they were worthy of his friendship,and worthy of the ideals of Organic Architecture and Democracy, as free valuable and valued individuals. John loved his clients with more devotion than any Architect I have ever known. He found what was good in each of them, and he believed and remembered that about them, and it seemed nothing else. John, to the last of his days, loved Frank Lloyd Wright. He never failed to honor his Master, he never spoke ill of him, or of the Taliesin Fellowship. I believe this was in no small part because John learned from Frank Lloyd Wright everything he could, he took all of the essence of Wright's Architecture into HIMSELF, distilled it, took the principles and made with them in every building a complete new world. He never ripped off a single detail from Wright, and therefore he never had to hate him.

John had no patience with lies, falsehood, of pretension. he could not abide people who tried to suck up to him, and flatter him with flowery statements. He didn't need that, he already knew he was America's best living Architect, there was nothing to say to him, really, beyond that.

This exhibit is one of the best ever on the artistic process of an Architect creating a building. In the respect that it focuses on birth, rather than a "completed" artifact, it is perhaps the best exhibit on Architecture of any kind ever mounted. John Lautner would be justly proud that his work was the work used to educate the public in this way.