Architecture
Fifty-five years of houses that treat structure as the idea rather than the means, built almost entirely on the difficult hillsides of this city.
John Lautner arrived in Los Angeles in the late 1930s to supervise a Frank Lloyd Wright house and never left. He was born in Marquette, Michigan in 1911, took a degree in English, and then spent six years as one of the first Taliesin Fellows, apprenticed directly to Wright from 1933. He opened his own Los Angeles practice in 1939. Over the following fifty-five years he produced a body of work that is instantly recognisable and almost impossible to categorise: concrete shells, radial plans, cantilevers, and rooms that open to the landscape without a visible frame.
Lautner was not, in his lifetime, a fashionable architect. He was absent from the Case Study House programme and from the International Style narrative that dominated writing about Californian modernism, he took almost no interest in publicity, and he was famously scathing about Los Angeles as a city while designing some of its finest buildings within it. Recognition came late and mostly from his peers: an American Institute of Architects Fellowship in 1970, and the Los Angeles AIA Gold Medal in 1993, a year before his death in October 1994. The reappraisal since has been comprehensive, and the market has followed it.
What holds the work together is an engineering instinct. Lautner solved each site structurally and let the solution become the architecture, which is why his houses look so unlike one another and so unlike anyone else's. A Lautner is not a style applied to a plan. It is a single idea about how to hold up a roof, or how to get a room out over a slope, carried through to the light fittings. That is also why they are difficult to alter and why the intact ones command what they do.
Lautner joined the Taliesin Fellowship in 1933, in its first year, and spent six years working directly with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin and Taliesin West. By 1937 he was supervising Wright projects in the field. He came to Los Angeles at the end of the decade to oversee construction of a Wright house and stayed to open his own practice in 1939. The apprenticeship shows in his commitment to organic architecture, to sites over programmes and to the idea that a building should emerge from its ground rather than sit on it.
The break with Wright shows too, and it is the more interesting half of the inheritance. Wright's houses are built up from a governing geometry that organises everything from the plan to the light fittings; Lautner's are built out from a single structural act, usually in concrete or steel, and the geometry follows from it. His first house for himself, built in Silver Lake in 1939, drew a remark from the critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock that it was the best house by an architect under thirty in the United States. It was an unusually emphatic start for a career that then spent the following three decades almost entirely outside the critical mainstream.
Lautner ran a small office for the whole of his career and took no interest in scaling it, turning down work rather than delegating it and remaining personally involved in the detailing of every house. That is one reason the built work is comparatively limited, somewhere over fifty significant structures across fifty-five years, when contemporaries of similar standing produced several hundred. It is also the reason the standard of resolution is so consistently high across the catalogue, and why the houses are so hard to alter successfully: there is no generic office language in them to fall back on, only decisions.
The most useful way to look at a Lautner is to find the structural move and read everything else from it. At Silvertop in Silver Lake, the move is a monolithic concrete roof arched over a continuous wall of glass, plus a four-inch cantilevered driveway with no supporting columns. The building inspector required a load test before signing it off; it passed by a wide margin, and the precedent set by that test was later used in the case for saving the Watts Towers. It was Lautner's first major use of monolithic concrete as sculpture rather than structure alone.
At the Chemosphere, the structural move is a single reinforced-concrete column, five feet across and close to thirty feet high, carrying an octagonal house of about 2,200 square feet on a slope that could not have been built on conventionally within the client's budget. At the Garcia House the move is a parabolic arched roof over a two-storey volume held on slender supports some sixty feet above the canyon floor. At the Sheats-Goldstein Residence it is a triangular coffered concrete roof cast with hundreds of drinking glasses set into the formwork, so that the ceiling itself admits points of daylight and reads at night as a field of stars.
These are engineering answers to site problems, and Lautner treated the answer as the architecture rather than as the means of delivering it. The consequence for an owner is that very little in a Lautner house is decorative, which means that very little can be removed without structural or spatial cost, and that almost nothing can be added without argument. It is also why the houses photograph so unusually well and so misleadingly: there is nothing in them that is not doing something, which reads as drama in an image and as discipline in person. Restoration, not renovation, is the operative word with this body of work.
Lautner's commercial work of the late 1940s is almost entirely gone, but it named a style. Googie's Coffee Shop, which he designed in 1949 on Sunset Boulevard near Crescent Heights, had an upswept cantilevered roof, a boomerang canopy, angled supports and a great deal of plate glass at street level. In 1952 the architecture critic Douglas Haskell, writing in House and Home, used the building's name as shorthand for the whole exuberant roadside modernism then spreading across Southern California, and the word stuck permanently to a movement Lautner had no wish to lead. Googie's itself was demolished in the late 1980s, unmourned at the time and much regretted since.
He also designed Henry's Restaurant in Glendale and work for the Tiny Naylor's chain, all of it since lost. The coffee shops matter to the residential work considerably more than their scale suggests. They were where Lautner first worked out cantilevered roofs carried on minimal supports, dramatic single-span structures, and the theatrical use of full-height glass at ground level, and every one of those preoccupations reappears in the houses of the 1950s and 1960s at a different pitch and for a different audience. The commercial commissions were, in effect, publicly visible structural experiments.
The near-total loss of that work is a fair summary of how Los Angeles treated its postwar commercial architecture through the 1970s and 1980s, when roadside modernism was regarded as disposable and preservation ordinances did not yet reach buildings of that age. Very little of the city's Googie fabric survives, and what does is mostly protected by accident rather than design. It also explains why the surviving residential work carries such weight in the Lautner story: with the restaurants gone, the houses are effectively the complete record of what he built, and each loss among them is proportionally larger.
The Hollywood Hills hold the densest concentration of Lautner's work, and it is where his structural thinking is most legible from a public road. The Malin Residence, universally known as the Chemosphere, was designed for the aerospace engineer Leonard Malin on a steeply sloping lot with a construction budget of around thirty thousand dollars, and completed in 1960; some sources date the design to 1958. It is reached by a funicular from the street below. It became a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2004, was bought by the publisher Benedikt Taschen in 1998, and was restored under his ownership by the architects Escher GuneWardena.
The Garcia House on Mulholland Drive, built in 1962 for the composer Russell Garcia and known as the Rainbow House for its stained glass, was restored under Marmol Radziner after 2002. The Wolff Residence of 1961 sits in the hills above the Sunset Strip, near the streets buyers know as the Bird Streets. The Harpel House of 1956 is a few hundred yards from the Chemosphere. The Bergren House of 1953 is in the hills above Hollywood, and the Foster Carling House of 1947 introduced a pivoting glass wall that swings out over a pool.
All of these are private homes on narrow hillside streets with no parking and no tolerance for visitors, and they should be treated accordingly. The Chemosphere is visible from several public roads at a distance, which is the only appropriate way to see it, and the Garcia House has been fenced by its owners precisely because it was not. Architectural tours run by preservation organisations occasionally include one or another of them, and those are worth waiting for. Turning up unannounced on a hillside street is not a way to see a Lautner; it is a way to annoy a neighbourhood.
Lautner's own first house of 1939 stood on Micheltorena Street in Silver Lake, and he returned to the neighbourhood repeatedly across his career. Silvertop, the Reiner-Burchill Residence, is also on Micheltorena: designed from about 1956 and largely complete in 1963 after roughly seven years of construction, then finished for a subsequent owner some years later, which is why sources give it various dates. It is the house in which he first used monolithic concrete as a sculptural medium at full scale, and the Los Angeles Conservancy gave it a preservation award in 2018 following a careful restoration by owners who understood what they had bought.
The Harvey House of 1950 sits on Live Oak Drive in the hills above Los Feliz, and the Hancock House of 1945 is also on the Silver Lake slopes. Taken together with the Neutra colony on the far side of the reservoir and Schindler's work nearby, this is the part of Los Angeles where postwar architectural experiment was densest and where it remains most visible from a public street, without gates, without hedges and without the security infrastructure of the westside canyons. It is one of the reasons the eastside carries a different architectural reputation from Bel-Air or Trousdale Estates.
The eastside houses are typically smaller and less expensive than the later hillside commissions, and they are the most approachable point of entry to the work for a buyer who wants a Lautner rather than a monument. They are also the examples most exposed to alteration, precisely because they are less famous, less studied and in most cases less formally protected. Several have already lost original glazing, kitchens or garden relationships to unremarkable remodelling. Anyone considering one should establish what remains original before negotiating, because the difference between an intact Lautner and a modernised one is the whole of the value.
The Sheats-Goldstein Residence in Beverly Crest, designed for Helen and Paul Sheats and their three children and built between 1961 and 1963, is the closest thing to a complete statement Lautner made. A triangular coffered concrete roof, cast with hundreds of drinking glasses set into the formwork to admit pinpricks of daylight, sits over a living room with no glass at all in its principal corner: the room simply stops, and the terrace, the pool and the view across the basin continue. Almost every element, including the seating and the lighting, is integral to the structure rather than placed within it.
The businessman James Goldstein bought the house in 1972 from its third owners and then did something unusual: he hired Lautner to keep working on it. The two continued to refine, correct and extend the house until Lautner's death in 1994, replacing materials, reworking the glazing and completing elements the original budget had not allowed. Goldstein carried on afterwards, adding an entertainment pavilion, a tennis court and, in 2004, a skyspace by the light artist James Turrell. In 2016 he announced the house, its estate and contents, his collection of Lautner architectural models and an endowment as a promised gift to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
That promised gift is significant well beyond the property itself. It means one major Lautner is destined for institutional stewardship and, in time, some form of public access, in a body of work that is otherwise entirely in private hands. It establishes a curatorial benchmark for how the rest should be maintained, and it puts a museum's conservation department into a conversation that has until now been conducted between owners and contractors. It is also the clearest evidence available anywhere of what a fifty-year relationship between a single house, its architect and its owner can produce when nobody is in a hurry.
Lautner's coastal work is less well known and structurally distinct from the hillside houses. The Stevens House of 1968 sits in Malibu Colony and turns a curved concrete face to the sea, with a roof shaped to shelter the terrace from onshore wind. The Segel House of 1979, on the Pacific Coast Highway, is among his most sculptural late works and among the most complete. The Beyer House of the early 1980s at Point Lechuza, near Point Dume, is a late statement in curved concrete on an exposed coastal bluff. The coast gave him a horizon rather than a slope, and the plans respond by opening laterally instead of cantilevering forward.
Owning one is a specialist undertaking and should be approached as such. Concrete shells and exposed structural elements require inspection by engineers who have worked on the type before, not by a general inspector with a moisture meter. Original glazing details are frequently bespoke and cannot be matched from a catalogue. Roof geometry is rarely conventional and almost never easy to re-roof to a modern warranty. The interiors were designed as single compositions in which built-in furniture, lighting, cabinetry and structure are inseparable, so a kitchen replacement is an architectural decision. Insurers and lenders occasionally struggle with the type, and that is worth establishing early.
The compensating fact is scarcity. There are fewer than sixty significant Lautner structures in existence, a number that only ever decreases, and the intact examples are tracked closely by the John Lautner Foundation, established in 1996, and by the wider preservation community. Losses continue: the Shusett House of 1951 was demolished in 2010. Buyers of John Lautner homes should expect to inherit a conservation responsibility along with the view, should price restoration work in advance rather than discovering it in the second year, and should assume that whatever they do to the building will be noticed and discussed by people who know it well.
Attributions on this page are drawn from published archives, preservation records and landmark documentation, and provenance should be independently verified for any specific property before it is relied upon.
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