RAY KAPPE
Ray Kappe (born 1927 in Minneapolis to Romanian immigrant parents) is an award winning architect and educator in Southern California. In 1972, he resigned his position as Founding Chair of the Department of Architecture at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and along with a group of faculty and students, started what eventually came to be known as the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).
In 2006, Ray Kappe began working with LivingHomes to design sustainable, modern, modular homes. LivingHomes is a developer of modern, prefabricated homes that combine world-class architecture with an unparalleled commitment to healthy and sustainable construction. The first LivingHome, designed by Ray Kappe, was the first in the nation to achieve LEED Platinum and was the only home to win the AIA’s top sustainability award in 2007. Ray Kappe's second LivingHome was selected as the Green Home of the Year by Green Builder Magazine. LivingHomes are available in standard or customized configurations to builders, developers and individuals.
As of 2007, Kappe is still actively involved in architectural theory and practice, particularly in the areas of sustainability and the prefabrication of residences.
FRANK GEHRY
Frank Owen Gehry, CC (born Frank Owen Goldberg; February 28, 1929) is a Canadian-American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles.
His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. His works are cited as being among the most important works of contemporary architecture in the 2010 World Architecture Survey, which led Vanity Fair to label him as "the most important architect of our age".
Gehry's best-known works include the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles; Experience Music Project in Seattle; Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis; Dancing House in Prague; the Vitra Design Museum and MARTa Museum in Germany; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Cinémathèque française in Paris; and 8 Spruce Street in New York City. But it was his private residence in Santa Monica,
California, which jump-started his career, lifting it from the status
of "paper architecture"—a phenomenon that many famous architects have
experienced in their formative decades through experimentation almost
exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in
later years. Gehry is also the designer of the future Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial.
Gehry was born Frank Owen Goldberg on February 28, 1929, in Toronto, Ontario to parents, Irwin and Thelma (née Thelma Caplan) Goldberg. His parents were Polish Jews. A creative child, he was encouraged by his grandmother, Mrs. Caplan,
with whom he would build little cities out of scraps of wood.
With these scraps from her husband's hardware store, she entertained
him for hours, building imaginary houses and futuristic cities on the
living room floor. His use of corrugated steel, chain link fencing, unpainted plywood
and other utilitarian or "everyday" materials was partly inspired by
spending Saturday mornings at his grandfather's hardware store. He would
spend time drawing with his father and his mother introduced him to the
world of art. "So the creative genes were there", Gehry says. "But my
father thought I was a dreamer, I wasn't gonna amount to anything. It
was my mother who thought I was just reticent to do things. She would
push me."
In 1947 Gehry moved to California, got a job driving a delivery truck, and studied at Los Angeles City College, eventually to graduate from the University of Southern California's School of Architecture. According to Gehry: “I was a truck driver
in L.A., going to City College, and I tried radio announcing, which I
wasn't very good at. I tried chemical engineering, which I wasn't very
good at and didn't like, and then I remembered. You know, somehow I just
started racking my brain about, "What do I like?" Where was I? What
made me excited? And I remembered art, that I loved going to museums and
I loved looking at paintings, loved listening to music. Those things
came from my mother, who took me to concerts and museums. I remembered
Grandma and the blocks, and just on a hunch, I tried some architecture
classes.” In 1952 he married Anita Snyder, and in 1956 he changed his name to Frank O. Gehry at her suggestion, in part because of the anti-semitism
he had experienced as a child and as a undergraduate at USC. Gehry
graduated at the top of his class with a Bachelor of Architecture degree
from USC in 1954. Afterwards, he spent time away from the field of
architecture in numerous other jobs, including service in the United States Army. In the fall of 1956, he moved his family to Cambridge, where he studied city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
He left before completing the program, disheartened and underwhelmed.
Gehry's left-wing ideas about socially responsible architecture were
under-realized, and the final straw occurred when he sat in on a
discussion of one professor's "secret project in progress" - a palace
that he was designing for right-wing Cuban Dictator Fulgencio Batista
(1901-1973).
In 1966 he and Snyder divorced. In 1975 he married Panamanian Berta
Isabel Aguilera, his current wife. He has two daughters from his first
marriage, and two sons from his second marriage.
Having grown up in Canada, Gehry is a huge fan of ice hockey. He began a hockey league in his office, FOG (which stands for Frank Owen Gehry), though he no longer plays with them, In 2004, he designed the trophy for the World Cup of Hockey. Gehry holds dual citizenship in Canada and the United States. He lives in Santa Monica, California, and continues to practice out of Los Angeles.
Much of Gehry's work falls within the style of Deconstructivism, which is often referred to as post-structuralist
in nature for its ability to go beyond current modalities of structural
definition. In architecture, its application tends to depart from modernism
in its inherent criticism of culturally inherited givens such as
societal goals and functional necessity. Because of this, unlike early
modernist structures, Deconstructivist structures are not required to
reflect specific social or universal ideas, such as speed or
universality of form, and they do not reflect a belief that form follows function.
Gehry's own Santa Monica residence is a commonly cited example of
deconstructivist architecture, as it was so drastically divorced from
its original context, and in such a manner as to subvert its original
spatial intention.
Gehry is sometimes associated with what is known as the "Los Angeles
School" or the "Santa Monica School" of architecture. The
appropriateness of this designation and the existence of such a school,
however, remains controversial due to the lack of a unifying philosophy
or theory. This designation stems from the Los Angeles area's producing a
group of the most influential postmodern architects, including such
notable Gehry contemporaries as Eric Owen Moss and Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne of Morphosis, as well as the famous schools of architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (co‑founded by Mayne), UCLA, and USC where Gehry is a member of the Board of Directors.
Gehry’s style at times seems unfinished or even crude, but his work is consistent with the California "funk"
art movement in the 1960s and early 1970s, which featured the use of
inexpensive found objects and non-traditional media such as clay to make
serious art. Gehry has been called "the apostle of chain-link fencing and corrugated metal siding".However, a retrospective exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum
in 1988 revealed that he is also a sophisticated classical artist, who
knows European art history and contemporary sculpture and painting.
CLIVE WILKINSON
Clive Wilkinson is an architect, designer, writer and strategist with particular expertise in the application of urban design thinking to interior design, specifically in workplace and educational communities. He was born in South Africa and educated in the United Kingdom. His practice, Clive Wilkinson Architects, was established in Los Angeles in 1991, and is an acknowledged global leader in workplace design. He's created unique spaces for Google, Nokia, Macquarie Group, Disney & TBWA\Chiat\Day. In 2005, Clive was inducted into the Interior Design ‘Hall of Fame’. In 2006, he was named as a ‘Master of Design’ by Fast Company magazine and, in 2011, a ‘Pioneer of Design’ by IIDA. His firm's portfolio of work has been selected as a Finalist for two years running in the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum National Design Awards. In 2012, the firm was honored as the Winner for excellence in the category of Interior Design. Clive is a former Board Director of AIA LA, a member of the GSA National Peer Registry and has served as a keynote speaker at global media and design conferences. His designs have received over 75 awards to date.
The firm’s design and consulting services cover the full spectrum of architecture and interior design, with added focus on research and feasibility analysis, urban design and master planning, lighting, furniture and graphic design. In keeping with the belief that every client’s needs are unique, there is no house style. The work is idea driven, but is also recognized for creating exceptional visual and architectural solutions.
RICHARD NEUTRA
Neutra was born in Leopoldstadt, the 2nd district of Vienna, Austria Hungary, on April 8, 1892. The future architect was born into a wealthy Jewish family. His Jewish-Hungarian father Samuel Neutra (1844, Hungary – 1920) was a proprietor of a metal foundry, and his mother, Elizabeth "Betty" Glaser Neutra (1851, Leopoldstadt – 1905) was a member of the IKG Wien. Richard has 2 brothers who also emigrated to the USA, and a sister who married in Vienna.
Neutra attended to the Sophiengymnasium in Vienna until 1910, and he studied under Adolf Loos at the Vienna University of Technology (1910–1918). He was a student of Max Fabiani and Karl Mayreder. In 1912 he undertook to study trip to Italy and Balkans with Ernst Ludwig Freud (son of Sigmund Freud).
After World War I Neutra went to Switzerland where he worked with the landscape architect Gustav Ammann. In 1921 he served briefly as city architect in the German town of Luckenwalde, and later in the same year he joined the office of Erich Mendelsohn in Berlin. Neutra contributed to the firm’s competition entry for a new commercial centre for Haifa, Palestine (1922), and to the Zehlendorf housing project in Berlin (1923).He married Dione Niedermann, the daughter of an architect, in 1922.
Neutra moved to the United States by 1923 and became a naturalized citizen in 1929. Neutra worked briefly for Frank Lloyd Wright before accepting an invitation from his close friend and university companion Rudolf Schindler to work and live communally in Schindler's Kings Road House in California. Neutra’s first work in Los Angeles was in landscape architecture, where he provided the design for the garden of Schindler’s beach house (1922–5), designed for Philip Lovell, Newport Beach, and for a pergola and wading pool for Wright and Schindler’s complex for Aline Barnsdall on Olive Hill (1925), Hollywood. Schindler and Neutra collaborated on an entry for the League of Nations Competition of 1926–7; in the same year they formed a firm with the planner Carol Aronovici (1881–1957) called the Architectural Group for Industry and Commerce (AGIC). He subsequently developed his own practice and went on to design numerous buildings embodying the International Style, twelve of which are designated as Historic Cultural Monuments (HCM), including the Lovell Heath House (HCM #123; 1929) and the Richard and Dion Neutra VDL Research House (HCM #640; 1966). In California, he became celebrated for rigorously geometric but airy structures that symbolized a West Coast variation on the mid-century modern residence. Clients included Edgar J. Kaufmann, Galka Scheyer, and Walter Conrad Arensberg. In the early 1930s, Neutra's Los Angeles practice trained several young architects who went on to independent success, including Gregory Ain, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Raphael Soriano.
In 1932, Neutra was included in the seminal MoMA exhibition on modern architecture, curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. In 1949 Neutra formed a partnership with Robert E. Alexander that lasted until 1958, which finally gave him the opportunity to design larger commercial and institutional buildings. In 1955, the US State Department commissioned Neutra to design a new embassy in Karachi. Neutra's appointment was part of an ambitious program of architectural commissions to renowned architects, which included embassies by Walter Gropius in Athens, Edward Durrell Stone in New Delhi, Marcel Breuer in The Hague, Josep Lluis Sert in Baghdad, and Eero Saarinen in London. In 1965 Neutra formed a partnership with his son Dion Neutra. Between 1960 and 1970, Neutra created eight villas in Europe, four in Switzerland, three in Germany and one in France. Prominent clients in this period included publisher of the ZEIT newspaper Gerd Bucerius but also figures from commerce and science.
Neutra died in Wuppertal, Germany, on April 16, 1970, at the age of 78
He was famous for the attention he gave to defining the real needs of his clients, regardless of the size of the project, in contrast to other architects eager to impose their artistic vision on a client. Neutra sometimes used detailed questionnaires to discover his client's needs, much to their surprise. His domestic architecture was a blend of art, landscape and practical comfort.
Neutra had a sharp sense of irony. In his autobiography, Life and Shape, he included a playful anecdote about an anonymous movie producer-client who electrified the moat around the house that Neutra designed for him and had his Persian butler fish out the bodies in the morning and dispose of them in a specially designed incinerator. This was a much-embellished account of an actual client, Josef von Sternberg, who indeed had a moated house but not an electrified one.
The novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand was the second owner of the Von Sternberg House in the San Fernando Valley (now destroyed). A photo of Neutra and Rand at the home was famously captured by Julius Shulman.
Neutra's early watercolors and drawings, most of them of places he traveled (particularly his trips to the Balkans in WWI) and portrait sketches, showed influence from artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele etc. Neutra's sister Josefine, who could draw, is cited as developing Neutra's inclination towards drawing (ref: Thomas Hines).
RUDOLF SCHINDLER
Schindler
was most influenced by professor Carl König, despite the presence of many
other famous professors such as Otto Wagnerand particularly, Adolf
Loos. Most notably, in 1911, he was introduced to the work of Frank Lloyd
Wright through the influential Wasmuth Portfolio.
Schindler
also met his lifelong friend and rival Richard Neutra at the
university in 1912, before completing his thesis project in 1913. Their careers
would parallel each other: both would go to Los Angeles through Chicago, be
recognized as important early modernists creating new styles suited to the
Californian climate, and sometimes, both would work for the same clients. At
one point, they and their wives shared a communal office and living structure
that Schindler designed as his home and studio.
In
Vienna, Schindler acquired experience in the firm of Hans Mayr and
Theodore Mayer, working there from September 1911 to February 1914.
Schindler then moved to Chicago to work in the firm of Ottenheimer,
Stern, and Reichert (OSR), accepting a cut in pay to be in that
progressive American city, which was the home of Frank Lloyd Wright. He
found New York, which he visited along the way, to be crowded,
unattractive, and commercial. Chicago was more appealing to him,
however, with less congestion and providing access to the architectural work of Henry
Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Schindler
continued to seek contact with Wright, writing letters despite his limited
English. He finally met him for the first time on December 30, 1914. Wright had
little work at this stage, was still plagued by the destruction of Taliesin and
the murder of his mistress earlier that year, and did not offer Schindler a
job. Schindler continued work at OSR, keeping himself occupied with trips and
study, notably familiarizing himself with the early tilt up slab work
of Irving Gill.
Schindler
was engaged to design several private commissions while in Los Angeles,
notably, he completed what many think is his finest building, the Kings
Road House, also known as the Schindler house or the Schindler-Chase house, as
an office and home for two professional couples by late spring 1922. He and his
wife were one of the couples living in the communal structure. He also started
to take on several projects of his own.
Wright
was able to hire Schindler after obtaining the commission for the Imperial
Hotel in Tokyo, a major project that would keep the architect in Japan for
several years. Schindler's role was to continue Wright's American operations in
his absence, working out of Wright's Oak Park studio. In 1919,
Schindler met and married Pauline Gibling (1893–1977) and in 1920
Wright summoned him to Los Angeles to work on the Barnsdall House.
During
this time, fractures started to appear in the Schindler-Wright relationship.
Schindler complained, with some validity, of being underpaid and exploited. As
well as his architectural affairs, he was running Lloyd Wright's businesses,
such as the rental of the Oak Park houses.
Of
the houses Wright built in this period, the Hollyhock House was
undoubtedly the most significant, for which Schindler did most of the drawings
and oversaw the construction of, while Frank Lloyd Wright still was in Japan.
The client, Aline Barnsdall, subsequently chose Schindler as her architect
to design a number of other small projects for her on Olive Hill and a
spectacular beach-side 'translucent house' in 1927, which remains one of the
great uncompleted projects of the twentieth century.
Schindler's
early buildings usually are characterized by concrete construction.
The Kings Road House, The Rodriguez House (seen in the film 'Pineapple Express
(film)', Pueblo Ribera Court, Lovell Beach House, Wolfe House, and How House
are the projects most frequently identified among these.
As
Schindler was applying for a Los Angeles license to practice architecture in
1929, he mentioned his extensive work on the architectural and structural plans
of the Imperial Hotel. Wright, however, refused to validate these claims.
Eventually, disputes over whose work was whose, escalated until Schindler
released a flier for a series of talks with Richard Neutra, describing himself
as having been, "in charge of the architectural office of Frank Lloyd Wright
for two years during his absence". Wright refuted this claim. The two
split in 1931 and never reconciled until 1953, less than a year before
Schindler's death.
The
Kings Road house was designed as a studio and home for Schindler, his wife, and
their friends Clyde and Marian DaCamara Chace. The floor plan worked itself
around several L-shapes. Construction features included tilt up concrete panels
cast on site, which contrasted with the more 'open' walls of redwood and
glass. It has largely become the symbol of Schindler's architecture.
In
a search to create a more inexpensive architecture, Schindler abandoned
concrete and turned to the plaster-skin design. This type of construction is
characteristic of his work throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but his interest in
form and space never changed.
He
developed his own platform frame system, the Schindler Frame in 1945.
His later work uses this system extensively as a basis for experimentation.
Schindler's
early work, such as the Kings Road House and Lovell Beach House,
largely went unnoticed in the wider architectural world. As early and radical
as they were for modernism, they may have been too different for recognition
and Los Angeles was not a significant location on the architectural map.
Schindler was not included in the highly influential International Style exhibit
of 1932, while Richard Neutra was and, to add insult to injury, Neutra,
incorrectly, was credited as the Austrian who worked on the Imperial Hotel with
Wright.
His
first major exposure came in Esther McCoy's 'Five California Architects'
of 1960. His work is undergoing somewhat of a contemporary revaluation for its
inventiveness, character, and formal qualities, which are making his designs
familiar to a new generation of architects.
The Mackey Apartments and the Schindler Residence are maintained by the Friends
of the Schindler House and the MAK Center (Austrian Museum of Applied Arts
/ Contemporary Art, Vienna).The MAK Center offers a variety of exhibitions and
events and is open to the public Wednesday through Sunday. The center also
sponsors six month residencies for emerging architects and artists who are
housed in the Mackey Apartments. Penthouse apartments can be rented there for
overnight accommodations or events.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
Frank Lloyd Wright (born Frank Lincoln Wright, June 8, 1867 –
April 9, 1959) was an American architect, interior designer, writer and
educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works.
Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and
its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture. This
philosophy was best exemplified by his design
for Fallingwater (1935), which has been called "the best
all-time work of American architecture". Wright was a leader of
the Prairie School movement of architecture and developed the concept
of the Usonian home, his unique vision for urban planning in the
United States.
His
work includes original and innovative examples of many different building
types, including offices, churches, schools, skyscrapers, hotels, and museums.
Wright also designed many of the interior elements of his buildings, such as
the furniture and stained glass. Wright authored 20 books and many
articles and was a popular lecturer in the United States and in Europe. His
colorful personal life often made headlines, most notably for the 1914 fire and
murders at his Taliesin studio. Already well known during his lifetime,
Wright was recognized in 1991 by the American Institute of
Architects as "the greatest American architect of all time."
Frank
Lloyd Wright was born in the farming town of Richland Center, Wisconsin,
United States, in 1867 and named Frank Lincoln Wright. His father, William
Carey Wright (1825–1904), was a locally admired orator, music teacher,
occasional lawyer, and itinerant minister. William Wright had met and married
Anna Lloyd Jones (1838/39 – 1923), a county school teacher, the previous year
when he was employed as the superintendent of schools for Richland County.
Originally from Massachusetts, William Wright had been a Baptist
minister, but he later joined his wife's family in
the Unitarian faith. Anna was a member of the large, prosperous and
well-known Lloyd Jones family of Unitarians, who had emigrated
from Wales to Spring Green, Wisconsin. One of Anna's brothers was Jenkin
Lloyd Jones, who would become an important figure in the spread of the
Unitarian faith in the Western United States. Both of Wright's parents were
strong-willed individuals with idiosyncratic interests that they passed on to
him. According to his biography his mother declared, when she was expecting her
first child, that he would grow up to build beautiful buildings. She decorated
his nursery with engravings of English cathedrals torn from a periodical to
encourage the infant's ambition. The family moved to Weymouth,
Massachusetts in 1870 for William to minister a small congregation.
In
1876, Anna visited the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and saw
an exhibit of educational blocks created by Friedrich Wilhelm August
Fröbel. The blocks, known as Froebel Gifts, were the foundation of his
innovative kindergarten curriculum. A trained teacher, Anna was
excited by the program and bought a set of blocks for her family. Young Wright
spent much time playing with the blocks. These were geometrically shaped and
could be assembled in various combinations to form three-dimensional
compositions. This is how Wright described, in his autobiography, the influence
of these exercises on his approach to design: "For several years I sat at
the little Kindergarten table-top . . . and played . . . with the cube, the
sphere and the triangle—these smooth wooden maple blocks . . . All are in my
fingers to this day . . ." Many of his buildings are notable for
their geometrical clarity.
The
Wright family struggled financially in Weymouth and returned to Spring
Green, Wisconsin, where the supportive Lloyd Jones clan could help William find
employment. They settled in Madison, where William taught music lessons
and served as the secretary to the newly formed Unitarian society. Although
William was a distant parent, he shared his love of music, especially the works
of Johann Sebastian Bach, with his children.
Soon
after Wright turned 14, his parents separated. Anna had been unhappy for some
time with William's inability to provide for his family and asked him to leave.
The divorce was finalized in 1885 after William sued Anna for lack of physical
affection. William left Wisconsin after the divorce and Wright claimed he never
saw his father again. At this time Wright changed his middle name from
Lincoln to Lloyd in honor of his mother's family, the Lloyd Joneses. As the
only male left in the family, Wright assumed financial responsibility for his
mother and two sisters.
Wright
attended a Madison high school, but there is no evidence he ever
graduated. He was admitted to the University of
Wisconsin–Madison as a special student in 1886. There he joined Phi
Delta Theta fraternity, took classes part-time for two semesters, and
worked with a professor of civil engineering, Allan D.
Conover. In 1887, Wright left the school without taking a degree (although
he was granted an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University in 1955).
In
1887, Wright arrived in Chicago in search of employment. As a result of the
devastating Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and recent population boom,
new development was plentiful in the city. He later recalled that his first
impressions of Chicago were that of grimy neighborhoods, crowded streets, and
disappointing architecture, yet he was determined to find work. Within days,
and after interviews with several prominent firms, he was hired as
a draftsman with the architectural firm of Joseph Lyman
Silsbee. Wright previously collaborated with Silsbee—accredited as the
draftsman and the construction supervisor—on the 1886 Unity
Chapel for Wright's family in Spring Green, Wisconsin.While with the
firm, he also worked on two other family projects: the All Souls
Church in Chicago for his uncle, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and the Hillside
Home School I in Spring Green for two of his aunts.Other draftsmen who
worked for Silsbee in 1887 included future architects Cecil
Corwin, George W. Maher, and George G. Elmslie. Wright soon
befriended Corwin, with whom he lived until he found a permanent home.
In
his autobiography, Wright recounts that he also had a short stint in another
Chicago architecture office. Feeling that he was underpaid for the quality of
his work for Silsbee (at $8 a week), the young draftsman quit and found work as
a designer at the firm of Beers, Clay, and Dutton. However, Wright
soon realized that he was not ready to handle building design by himself; he
left his new job to return to Joseph Silsbee—this time with a raise in salary.
Although
Silsbee adhered mainly
to Victorian and revivalist architecture, Wright found his
work to be more "gracefully picturesque" than the other
"brutalities" of the period. Still, Wright aspired for more
progressive work. After less than a year had passed in Silsbee's office, Wright
learned that the Chicago firm of Adler & Sullivan was
"looking for someone to make the finish drawings for the interior of
the Auditorium [Building]."Wright demonstrated that he was a
competent impressionist of Louis Sullivan's ornamental designs and two
short interviews later, was an official apprentice in the firm.
Wright
did not get along well with Sullivan's other draftsmen; he wrote that several
violent altercations occurred between them during the first years of his
apprenticeship. For that matter, Sullivan showed very little respect for his
employees as well. In spite of this, "Sullivan took [Wright] under
his wing and gave him great design responsibility." As a show of respect,
Wright would later refer to Sullivan as Lieber Meister (German
for "Dear Master"). Wright also formed a bond with office
foreman Paul Mueller. Wright would later engage Mueller to build several
of his public and commercial buildings between 1903 and 1923.
On
June 1, 1889, Wright married his first wife, Catherine Lee
"Kitty" Tobin (1871–1959). The two had met around a year earlier
during activities at All Souls Church. Sullivan did his part to facilitate the
financial success of the young couple by granting Wright a five-year employment
contract. Wright made one more request: "Mr. Sullivan, if you want me to
work for you as long as five years, couldn't you lend me enough money to build
a little house?" With Sullivan's $5,000 loan, Wright purchased a lot
at the corner of Chicago and Forest Avenues in the suburb of Oak Park. The
existing Gothic Revival house was given to his mother, while a
compact Shingle style house was built alongside for Wright and
Catherine.
According
to an 1890 diagram of the firm's new, 17th floor space atop the Auditorium
Building, Wright soon earned a private office next to Sullivan's
own. However, that office was actually shared with friend and draftsman
George Elmslie, who was hired by Sullivan at Wright's request. Wright had
risen to head draftsman and handled all residential design work in the office.
As a general rule, Adler & Sullivan did not design or build houses, but
they obliged when asked by the clients of their important commercial projects.
Wright was occupied by the firm's major commissions during office hours, so
house designs were relegated to evening and weekend overtime hours at his home
studio. He would later claim total responsibility for the design of these
houses, but careful inspection of their architectural style, and accounts from
historian Robert Twombly suggest that it was Sullivan that dictated the overall
form and motifs of the residential works; Wright's design duties were often
reduced to detailing the projects from Sullivan's sketches. During this
time, Wright worked on Sullivan's bungalow (1890) and the James
A. Charnley Bungalow (1890) both in Ocean Springs, Mississippi,
the Berry-MacHarg House (1891) and Sullivan's
townhouse (1892) both in Chicago, and the most noted 1891 James A.
Charnley House also in Chicago. Of the five collaborations, only the two
commissions for the Charnley family still stand.
Despite
Sullivan's loan and overtime salary, Wright was constantly short on funds.
Wright admitted that his poor finances were likely due to his expensive tastes
in wardrobe and vehicles, and the extra luxuries he designed into his house. To
compound the problem, Wright's children – including first
born Lloyd (b.1890) and John (b.1892) – would share similar
tastes for fine goods.To supplement his income and repay his debts, Wright
accepted independent commissions for at least nine houses. These
"bootlegged" houses, as he later called them, were conservatively
designed in variations of the fashionable Queen
Anne and Colonial Revival styles. Nevertheless, unlike the
prevailing architecture of the period, each house emphasized simple geometric
massing and contained features such as bands of horizontal windows,
occasional cantilevers, and open floor plans which would become hallmarks
of his later work. Eight of these early houses remain today including
the Thomas Gale, Parker, Blossom, and Walter Gale houses.
As
with the residential projects for Adler & Sullivan, Wright designed his
bootleg houses on his own time. Sullivan knew nothing of the independent works
until 1893, when he recognized that one of the houses was unmistakably a Frank
Lloyd Wright design. This particular house, built for Allison Harlan, was
only blocks away from Sullivan's townhouse in the Chicago community
of Kenwood. Aside from the location, the geometric purity of the
composition and balcony tracery in the same style as the Charnley
House likely gave away Wright's involvement. Since Wright's five year contract
forbade any outside work, the incident led to his departure from Sullivan's
firm. A variety of stories recount the break in the relationship between
Sullivan and Wright; even Wright later told two different versions of the
occurrence. In An Autobiography, Wright claimed that he was unaware
that his side ventures were a breach of his contract. When Sullivan learned of
them, he was angered and offended; he prohibited any further outside
commissions and refused to issue Wright the deed to his Oak Park
house until after he completed his five years. Wright could not bear the new
hostility from his master and thought the situation was unjust. He "threw
down [his] pencil and walked out of the Adler and Sullivan office never to
return." Dankmar Adler, who was more sympathetic to Wright's actions,
later sent him the deed. On the other hand, Wright told
his Taliesin apprentices (as recorded by Edgar Tafel) that Sullivan
fired him on the spot upon learning of the Harlan House. Tafel also accounted
that Wright had Cecil Corwin sign several of the bootleg jobs, indicating that
Wright was aware of their illegal nature. Regardless of the correct series
of events, Wright and Sullivan did not meet or speak for twelve years.
After
leaving Louis Sullivan, Wright established his own practice on the top floor of
the Sullivan designed Schiller Building (1892, demolished 1961)
on Randolph Street in Chicago. Wright chose to locate his office in
the building because the tower location reminded him of the office of Adler
& Sullivan. Although Cecil Corwin followed Wright and set up his
architecture practice in the same office, the two worked independently and did
not consider themselves partners. Within a year, Corwin decided that he
did not enjoy architecture and journeyed east to find a new profession.
With
Corwin gone, Wright moved out of the Schiller Building and into the nearby and
newly completed Steinway Hall Building. The loft space was shared
with Robert C. Spencer, Jr., Myron Hunt, and Dwight H.
Perkins. These young architects, inspired by the Arts and Crafts
Movement and the philosophies of Louis Sullivan, formed what would become
known as the Prairie School.They were joined by Perkins apprentice, Marion
Mahony, who in 1895 transferred to Wright's team of drafters and took over
production of his presentation drawings and
watercolor renderings. Mahony, the first licensed female architect in the
United States, also designed furniture, leaded glass windows, and light
fixtures, among other features, for Wright's houses. Between 1894 and the
early 1910s, several other leading Prairie School architects and many of
Wright's future employees launched their careers in the offices of Steinway
Hall.
Wright's
projects during this period followed two basic models. On one hand, there was
his first independent commission, the Winslow House, which combined
Sullivanesque ornamentation with the emphasis on simple geometry and horizontal
lines that is typical in Wright houses. The Francis Apartments (1895,
demolished 1971) Heller House (1896), Rollin Furbeck
House (1897), and Husser House (1899, demolished 1926) were
designed in the same mode. For more conservative clients, Wright conceded to
design more traditional dwellings. These included the Dutch Colonial
Revival style Bagley House (1894), Tudor
Revival style Moore House I (1895), and Queen
Anne style Charles Roberts House (1896). As an emerging
architect, Wright could not afford to turn down clients over disagreements in
taste, but even his most conservative designs retained simplified massing and
occasional Sullivan inspired details.
Wright
relocated his practice to his home in 1898 in order to bring his work and
family lives closer. This move made further sense as the majority of the
architect's projects at that time were in Oak Park or neighboring River
Forest. The past five years had seen the birth of three more children
– Catherine in 1894, David in 1895, and Frances in
1898 – prompting Wright to sacrifice his original home studio space for
additional bedrooms. Thus, moving his workspace necessitated his design and
construction of an expansive studio addition to the north of the main
house. The space, which included a hanging balcony within the two story
drafting room, was one of Wright's first experiments with innovative structure.
The studio was a poster for Wright's developing aesthetics and would become the
laboratory from which the next ten years of architectural creations would
emerge.
Soon
after the completion of the Winslow House in 1894, Edward Waller, a friend and
former client, invited Wright to meet Chicago architect and planner Daniel
Burnham. Burnham had been impressed by the Winslow House and other examples of
Wright's work; he offered to finance a four year education at the École
des Beaux-Arts and two years in Rome. To top it off, Wright would have a
position in Burnham's firm upon his return. In spite of guaranteed success and
support of his family, Wright declined the offer. Burnham, who had directed the
classical design of the World's Columbian Exposition was a major
proponent of the Beaux Arts movement, thought that Wright was making a
foolish mistake. Yet for Wright, the classical education of the École lacked
creativity and was altogether at odds with his vision of modern American
architecture.
By
1901, Wright had completed about 50 projects, including many houses in Oak
Park. As his son John Lloyd Wright wrote:
"William
Eugene Drummond, Francis Barry Byrne, Walter Burley Griffin, Albert
Chase McArthur, Marion Mahony, Isabel Roberts and George
Willis were the draftsmen. Five men, two women. They wore flowing ties,
and smocks suitable to the realm. The men wore their hair like Papa, all except
Albert, he didn't have enough hair. They worshiped Papa! Papa liked them! I
know that each one of them was then making valuable contributions to the
pioneering of the modern American architecture for which my father gets the
full glory, headaches and recognition today!"
Between
1900 and 1901, Frank Lloyd Wright completed four houses which have since been
considered the onset of the "Prairie style". Two,
the Hickox and Bradley Houses, were the last transitional step
between Wright's early designs and the Prairie creations. Meanwhile,
the Thomas House and Willits House received recognition as
the first mature examples of the new style. At the same time, Wright gave
his new ideas for the American house widespread awareness through two
publications in the Ladies' Home Journal. The articles were in response
to an invitation from the president of Curtis Publishing
Company, Edward Bok, as part of a project to improve modern house design.
Bok also extended the offer to other architects, but Wright was the sole
responder. "A Home in a Prairie Town" and "A Small House with
Lots of Room in it" appeared respectively in the February and July 1901
issues of the journal. Although neither of the affordable house plans were ever
constructed, Wright received increased requests for similar designs in
following years.[38]
Wright's
residential designs were "Prairie Houses" because the design is
considered to complement the land around Chicago. These houses featured
extended low buildings with shallow, sloping roofs, clean sky lines, suppressed
chimneys, overhangs and terraces all using unfinished materials. The
houses are credited with being the first examples of the "open plan".
Windows whenever possible are long, and low, allowing a connection between the
interior and nature, outside, that was new to western architecture and
reflected the influence of Japanese architecture on Wright. The manipulation of
interior space in residential and public buildings are hallmarks of his style.
Public
buildings in the Prairie style include Unity Temple, the home of the
Unitarian Universalist congregation in Oak Park. As a
lifelong Unitarian and member of Unity Temple, Wright offered his
services to the congregation after their church burned down in 1905. The
community agreed to hire him and he worked on the building from 1905 to 1909. Wright
later said that Unity Temple was the edifice in which he ceased to be an
architect of structure, and became an architect of space. Many architects
consider it the world's first modern building, because of its unique
construction of only one material: reinforced concrete. This would become a
hallmark of the modernists who followed Wright, such as Mies van der Rohe, and
even some post-modernists, such as Frank Gehry.
Many
examples of this work are in Buffalo, New York as a result of friendship
between Wright and Darwin D. Martin, an executive of the Larkin Soap
Company. In 1902, the Larkin Company decided to build a new administration
building. Wright came to Buffalo and designed not only the Larkin
Administration Building (completed in 1904, demolished in 1950), but also
homes for three of the company's executives including the Darwin D. Martin
House in 1904.
Other
Wright houses considered to be masterpieces of the late Prairie Period
(1907–1909) are the Frederick Robie House in Chicago and the Avery and
Queene Coonley House in Riverside, Illinois. The Robie House,
with its soaring, cantilevered roof lines, supported by a
110-foot-long (34 m) channel of steel, is the most dramatic. Its living and
dining areas form virtually one uninterrupted space. This building had a
profound influence on young European architects after World War I and is
sometimes called the "cornerstone of modernism". However, Wright's
work was not known to European architects until the publication of the Wasmuth
Portfolio.
Local
gossips noticed Wright's flirtations, and he developed a reputation in Oak Park
as a man-about-town. His family had grown to six children, and the brood
required most of Catherine's attention. In 1903, Wright designed a house for
Edwin Cheney, a neighbor in Oak Park, and immediately took a liking to Cheney's
wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mamah Cheney was a modern woman with
interests outside the home. She was an early feminist and Wright viewed her as
his intellectual equal. The two fell in love, even though Wright had been
married for almost 20 years. Often the two could be seen taking rides in
Wright's automobile through Oak Park, and they became the talk of the town.
Wright's wife, Kitty, sure that this attachment would fade as the others had,
refused to grant him a divorce. Neither would Edwin Cheney grant one to Mamah.
In 1909, even before the Robie House was completed, Wright and Mamah
Cheney went together to Europe, leaving their own spouses and children behind.
The scandal that erupted virtually destroyed Wright's ability to practice
architecture in the United States.
Scholars
argue that he felt by 1907 that he had done everything he could do with the
Prairie Style, particularly from the standpoint of the single family
house. Wright was not getting larger commissions for commercial or public
buildings, which frustrated him.
What
drew Wright to Europe was the chance to publish a portfolio of his work with
Ernst Wasmuth, who had agreed in 1909 to publish his work there. This
chance also allowed Wright to deepen his relationship with Mamah Cheney. Wright
and Cheney left the United States in 1909 going to Berlin, where the offices of
Wasmuth were located.
The
resulting two volumes, titled Studies and Executed Buildings of Frank
Lloyd Wright, were published in 1911 in two editions, creating the first
major exposure of Wright's work in Europe. The work contained more than
100 lithographs of Wright's designs and was commonly known as
the Wasmuth Portfolio.
Wright
remained in Europe for almost one year and set up home first in Florence,
Italy – where he lived with his eldest son Lloyd – and later
in Fiesole, Italy where he lived with Mamah. During this time, Edwin
Cheney granted Mamah a divorce, though Kitty still refused to grant one to her
husband. After Wright's return to the United States in October 1910, Wright
persuaded his mother to buy land for him in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The
land, bought on April 10, 1911, was adjacent to land held by his mother's
family, the Lloyd-Joneses. Wright began to build himself a new home, which he
called Taliesin, by May 1911. The recurring theme of Taliesin also came
from his mother's side: Taliesin in Welsh mythology was a
poet, magician, and priest. The family motto was Y Gwir yn Erbyn y Byd which
means "The Truth Against the World"; it was created by Iolo
Morgannwg who also had a son called Taliesin, and the motto is still used
today as the cry of the druids and chief bard of the Eisteddfod in
Wales.
On
August 15, 1914, while Wright was working in Chicago, Julian Carlton, a male
servant from Barbados who had been hired several months earlier, set
fire to the living quarters of Taliesin and murdered seven people with
an axe as the fire burned.The dead included Mamah; her two children,
John and Martha; a gardener; a draftsman named Emil Brodelle; a workman; and
another workman's son. Two people survived the mayhem, one of whom helped to
put out the fire that almost completely consumed the residential wing of the
house. Carlton swallowed muriatic acid immediately following the
attack in an attempt to kill himself. He was
nearly lynched on the spot, but was taken to
the Dodgevillejail. Carlton died from starvation seven
weeks after the attack, despite medical attention.
In
1922, Wright's first wife, Kitty, granted him a divorce, and Wright was
required to wait one year until he married his then-partner, Maude
"Miriam" Noel. In 1923, Wright's mother, Anna (Lloyd Jones) Wright,
died. Wright wed Miriam Noel in November 1923, but her addiction
to morphine led to the failure of the marriage in less than one year.
In 1924, after the separation but while still married, Wright met Olga
(Olgivanna) Lazovich Hinzenburg at a Petrograd Ballet performance
in Chicago. They moved in together at Taliesin in 1925, and soon Olgivanna was
pregnant with their daughter, Iovanna, born on December 2, 1925.
On
April 20, 1925, another fire destroyed the bungalow at Taliesin. Crossed wires
from a newly installed telephone system were deemed to be responsible for the
blaze, which destroyed a collection of Japanese prints that Wright declared
invaluable. Wright estimated the loss at $250,000 to $500,000. Wright
rebuilt the living quarters again, naming the home "Taliesin III".
In
1926, Olga's ex-husband, Vlademar Hinzenburg, sought custody of his daughter,
Svetlana. In October 1926, Wright and Olgivanna were accused of violating
the Mann Act and arrested in Minnetonka, Minnesota. The
charges were later dropped.
Wright
and Miriam Noel's divorce was finalized in 1927, and once again, Wright was
required to wait for one year until marrying again. Wright and Olgivanna
married in 1928.
Wright
also built several houses in the Los Angeles area. Currently open to the public
are the Hollyhock House (Aline Barnsdall Residence) in Hollywood and
the Anderton Court Shops in Beverly Hills.
Following
the Hollyhock House, Wright used an innovative building process in 1923 and
1924, which he called the textile block system where buildings were
constructed with precast concrete blocks with a patterned, squarish exterior
surface: The Alice Millard House (Pasadena), the John Storer
House (West Hollywood), the Samuel Freeman House (Hollywood) and
the Ennis House in the Griffith Park area of Los Angeles. During the
past two decades the Ennis House has become popular as an exotic, nearby
shooting location to Hollywood television and movie makers. He also designed a
fifth textile block house for Aline Barnsdall, the Community Playhouse
("Little Dipper"), which was never constructed. Wright's
son, Lloyd Wright, supervised construction for the Storer, Freeman and
Ennis House. Most of these houses are private residences closed to the public
because of renovation, including the George Sturges House (Brentwood)
and the Arch Oboler Gatehouse & Studio (Malibu).
JOHN LAUTNER
Lautner
was born in Marquette, Michigan in 1911 and was of mixed Austrian and Irish
descent. His father, John Edward Lautner, who migrated from Germany ca. 1870,
was self-educated, but gained a place at the University of Michigan as an adult
and then studied philosophy in Göttingen, Leipzig, Geneva and Paris. In 1901 he
was appointed as head of French and German at the recently founded Marquette
Northern State Normal School (now Northern Michigan University), where he later
became a teacher. His mother, Vida Cathleen Gallagher, was an interior designer
and an accomplished painter.
The
Lautners were keenly interested in art and architecture and in May 1918 their
Marquette home "Keepsake", designed by Joy Wheeler Dow, was featured
in the magazine The American Architect. A crucial early influence in
Lautner's life was the construction of the family's idlyllic summer cabin,
"Midgaard", sited on a rock shelf on a remote headland on the shore
on Lake Superior. The Lautners designed and built the cabin themselves and his
mother designed and painted all the interior details, based on her study of
Norse houses.
In
1929 Lautner enrolled in the Liberal Arts program at his father's
college — now renamed Northern State Teachers College — where he
studied philosophy, ethics, physics, literature, drafting, art and
architectural history, read the work of Immanuel Kant and Henri Bergson, played
woodwinds and piano, and developed an interest in jazz. He furthered his
studies in Boston, Massachusetts and New York City. In 1933 Lautner graduated
with a degree in Liberal Arts.
In
April 1933, after reading the autobiography of Frank Lloyd Wright, Vida Lautner
approached the architect, who had recently launched his apprenticeship program
at Taliesin. Lautner was quickly admitted to the Fellowship, but he had
recently become engaged to a neighbor, Mary Faustina ("MaryBud")
Roberts and could not afford the fees, so Vida approached MaryBud's mother, who
agreed to pay for the couple to join the program. He soon realized that he had
little interest in formal drafting and avoided the Taliesin drafting room,
preferring daily duties of "carpenter, plumber, farmer, cook and
dishwasher, that is an apprentice, which I still believe is the real way to
learn".From 1933 to 1939 he worked and studied under Wright at the studios
in Wisconsin and Arizona, alongside other renowned artists and architects like
E. Fay Jones and Santiago Martinez Delgado.
Lautner
progressed rapidly under Wright's mentorship. By 1934 — the year he and
MaryBud married — he was preparing design details for a Wright house in
Los Angeles for Alice Millard, working on the Playhouse and Studios at
Taliesin,and he had the first of many articles (under the masthead "At
Taliesin") published in the Wisconsin State Journal and Capital Times.
The following year he was assigned to what became a two-year project supervising
a Wright-designed house in Marquette for MaryBud's mother. In 1937 he agreed to
oversee the construction of the Johnson residence "Wingspread" (his
personal favorite among the Wright projects he worked on) near Racine,
Wisconsin and traveled with Wright to supervise photography of the Malcolm
Willey House in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which became a key source for his own
small houses. He was also deeply involved in the construction of the
Drafting Room at Taliesin West — which influenced the design of his Mauer
House (1946) — collated photographs of Wright's work for a 1938 special
issue of Architectural Forum and later briefly returned to Taliesin
to help assemble models and materials for a 1940 Museum of Modern Art
exhibition.
Lautner
left the Fellowship in early 1938 (primarily because MaryBud was pregnant) to
establish his own architecture practice in Los Angeles, but he told his mentor
that, while seeking an independent career, he remained "ready to do
anything you or your Fellowship need". They worked together on around
eleven Los Angeles projects over the next five years and their association
continued sporadically. The Lautners arrived in Los Angeles in March 1938 and
their first child Karol was born in May. Lautner's first independent project was
a low-cost $2500 one-bedroom frame house for the Springer family, built with
his contractor friend Paul Speer, but this was to be the only product of their
brief collaboration. In September 1938 Wright contacted him and this led to
Lautner's supervision of a series of Los Angeles domestic projects, the
Sturges, Green, Lowe, Bell and Mauer houses.
His
first significant solo project was his own Los Angeles home, the Lautner House
(1939), which helped to establish his name — it was the subject of
Lautner's first article on his own work, published in the June–July edition of California
Arts & Architcture, and it was featured in Home Beautiful
where it was lauded by Henry-Russell Hitchcock as "the best house in the
United States by an architect under thirty".During this period Lautner
worked with Wright on the designs of the Sturges House in Brentwood Heights,
California and on the unbuilt Jester House. Lautner supervised the building of
the Sturges House for Wright, but during construction he ran into serious
design, cost and construction problems which climaxed with the threat of legal
action by the owners, forcing Wright to bring in students from Taliesin to
complete repairs.
In
the meantime, the Bell and Green projects had both stalled due to rising costs.
The Greens canceled, but Wright gave the Bell commission to Lautner. He was
also engaged to supervise the Mauer house when the Mauers dismissed Wright for
failing to deliver the working drawings in time. Although the Mauer House was
not finished for another five years, the Bell House was quickly completed and
it consolidated the earlier success of the Lautner House, earning him wide
praise and recognition — the University of Chicago solicited plans and
drawings for use as a teaching tool, and it was featured in numerous
publications over the next few years including the Los Angeles Times, a
three-page spread in the June 1942 issue of Arts and Architecture, the
May 1944 issue House and Garden (which declared it "the model house
for California living"), a California Designs feature centering on
the Bell and Mauer houses, Architectural Forum, and The Californian.
During
1941 Lautner was again brought in to oversee two more Wright projects that had
run into trouble: the redesign of the Ennis House and an ill-fated
project for a lavish Malibu residence ("Eaglefeather") for
filmmaker Arch Oboler. This was beset by many problems (including the tragic
drowning of Oboler's son in a water-filled excavation). A Lautner-designed
retreat for Oboler's wife was eventually built.
During
1942 he designed a caretaker's cottage for the Astor Farm (since demolished)
and in 1943 he joined the Structon Company, where he worked on wartime military
construction and engineering projects in California, giving him valuable
exposure to current developments in construction technology. This also marked
the end of his professional association with Frank Lloyd Wright.
In
1944 Lautner pursued joint ventures with architects Samuel Reisbord and Whitney
R. Smith before becoming a design associate in the practice of Douglas Honnold.
He collaborated with Honnold on several projects including Coffee Dan's
restaurants on Vine St., Hollywood, and on Broadway downtown Los Angeles, and a
remodel of the Beverly Hills Athletic Club (since demolished) as well as two
solo projects, the Mauer House and the Eisele Guest House. Another significant
landmark this year was the article "Three Western Homes" in the March
edition of House & Garden, which included floor plans of the Bell
Residence and four (uncredited) photos of the house by Julius Shulman.These
photos marked the start of a lifelong association between architect and
photographer; over the next fifty years Shulman logged some 75 assignments on
various Lautner projects (for Lautner and other clients) and his photos of
Lautner's architecture have appeared in at least 275 articles.
Lautner
left the Honnold practice in 1947, primarily because he had begun a
relationship with Honnold's wife Elizabeth Gilman (although the two men
reportedly remained friends). He
separated from MaryBud (they divorced later that year) and moved into the
Honnold residence at 1818 El Cerrito Place, where he established his own design
office. He embarked on a string of significant design projects including the
Carling Residence, the Desert Hot Springs Motel, the Gantvoort Residence and
Henry's Restaurant in Glendale. Lautner
soon established a high media profile and throughout the late 1940s and early
1950s his work featured regularly in both popular and professional
publications, including Architectural Record, Arts & Architecture,
House & Garden, Ladies' Home Journal and the Los Angeles
Times.
Lautner
and Gilman married in 1948 and MaryBud returned to Marquette with their four
children, daughters Karol Lautner (b. 1938), Mary Beecher Lautner (b.
California, 1944), Judith Munroe Lautner (b. California, 1946) and son Michael
John Lautner (b. Astor Farm, Indio, California, 1942 - d. California,
2005).Lautner's output that year included the Tower Motors Lincoln-Mercury
Showroom in Glendale and the Sheats "L'Horizon" Apartments, but most
of the other designs dating from that year were domestic commissions that were
never built.
There
were more important commissions in 1949–1950 including the Dahlstrom Residence,
Googie's Coffee House and the UPA Studios in Burbank. During 1950 he was part
of a group exhibition of sixteen California architects at Scripps College in
Claremont, California, and in 1951 his work was included in Harris and
Bonenberg's influential guidebook A Guide to Contemporary Architecture in
Southern California (Watling, 1951). Lautner
obtained his architectural license in 1952 and in February House and Home
published the genre-defining Douglas Haskell article "Googie
Architecture", which included two Shulman photographs of the Los Angeles
restaurant accompanied by an article on the Foster and Carling houses and
L'Horizon apartments.
From
the late 1940s until his death, Lautner worked primarily on designing domestic
residences. His early work was on a relatively modest scale but in later years,
as his reputation grew and his client base became more affluent, his design
projects became increasingly grand, culminating in the palatial 25,000 sq ft
(2,300 m2) Arango residence in
Acapulco, Mexico. This project, along with his appointment as Olympic Architect
for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, were among the highlights of
his later career.
After
many years of chronic illness Elizabeth Lautner died in 1978; in 1982 Lautner
married her caretaker, Francesca. Lautner's last years were also marred by
declining health and loss of mobility. In the last few years of his life he was
unable to work, and his practice survived thanks to the unflagging support of
his client James Goldstein and Lautner's partner and protégée Helena
Arahuete. On Lautner's death in 1994, Arahuete took over the practice, which
continues in business to the present today.
In
recent years Lautner's work has undergone a significant critical reappraisal
with the 1999 publication of Alan Hess and Alan Weintraub's "The
Architecture of John Lautner" (Rizzoli), and a 2008 exhibit at the Hammer
Museum curated by architect Frank Escher and architectural historian Nicholas
Olsberg. In 2009 Lautner was the subject of a documentary feature film direct
by Murray Grigor, Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner.
ARCHITECTURE
& INFLUENCE
John
Lautner designed over 200 architectural projects during his career, but many
designs for larger buildings were never realised. In the architectural press
his extant body of work has been dominated by his domestic commissions;
although he designed numerous commercial buildings including Googie's, Coffee
Dan's and Henry's restaurants, the Beachwood Market, Desert Hot Springs Motel,
and the Lincoln Mercury Showroom in Glendale, sadly, several of these buildings
have since been demolished. With a handful of exceptions (e.g. the Arango
Residence in Acapulco, the Turner House in Aspen, Colorado, the Harpel House #2
in Anchorage, Alaska, the Ernest Lautner house in Pensacola, Florida) nearly
all of Lautner's extant buildings are in California, mostly in and around Los
Angeles.
Another
point of similarity is that, like Wright, many of Lautner's houses were sited
in elevated locations or "difficult" sites — hillsides or
seashores — and were expressly designed to take full advantage of the
vistas these sites offered; he also followed Wright's dictum of building on a
slope rather than on the very top of a hill.
Lautner's
approach to architecture embodied many of Wright's philosophies and
preoccupations, above all, the notion of a building as a "total
concept". Like Wright, his work also shows a strong preoccupation with
essential geometric forms — the circle and the triangle are dominant
motifs in both his overall designs and his detailing — and his houses are
similarly rooted in the idea of integrating the house into its location and
creating an organic flow between indoor and outdoor spaces, although Lautner's
work arguably took the latter concept to even greater heights.
Lautner's
work is especially significant for its radical expansion of both the technical
and spatial vocabulary of domestic architecture. He achieved this through his
use of the latest building technologies and materials, e.g., his pioneering use
of glue-laminated plywood beams, steel beams and sheeting, and especially his
ongoing exploration of the architectural possibilities of reinforced and
prestressed concrete — and through his use of non-linear, open-plan and
multi-level layouts, shaped and folded concrete forms, skylights and
light-wells and panoramic expanses of plate glass.
MAJOR
WORKS:
Foster
Carling Residence
One
of Lautner's most significant early works, this house embodies many of his
central design concerns and includes key features that he would continue to
explore and develop throughout his career. It was also important as the project
that united him with builder John de la Vaux. Fortuitously, the pair met
through their wives, who knew each other socially — at the time, Lautner
was having trouble finding contractors to work on his houses, and de la Vaux, a
boat builder, was keen to move into housing construction. At his wife's
suggestion de la Vaux approached Lautner and offered to build the Carling
House, and they sealed the deal with a handshake. As de La Vaux recounted in
the 2009 Lautner documentary, the project was briefly halted by a rare snowstorm
that dumped more than six inches of snow on the Hollywood area.[36]
Lautner's design incorporates many innovative features: He used external steel
cantilever beams to support the roof of the hexagonal main living area,
creating a completely open space, free of any internal columns. This design,
and the house's hillside situation, combine to afford 360-degree views across
Los Angeles. Another striking feature is the movable wall-seat — one
entire wall section of the living area, with a built-in couch, is hinged on one
side and supported by a caster on the other, allowing the entire structure to
swing out, opening the room out to the adjoining terrace. This is an idea he
revisited with the Turner Residence in Aspen. There is also a swimming pool
that partly intrudes into the living area under a sheet of plate glass, a
feature that he revisited to even greater effect in the Elrod House. The
Carling House has become one Lautner's most celebrated designs and marked the
beginning of his fruitful collaboration with de la Vaux, which lasted through
seven major projects, including the famous "Chemosphere".
Googie
Although
best known for his residential commissions, Lautner was also an important
contributor to the commercial genre known as Googie architecture. Alan Hess,
author of Googie Redux: Ultramodern Roadside Architecture records
Lautner's contributions to a new car-oriented architecture developing in
Southern California by architects such as Lloyd Wright and Wayne McAllister
from the 1920s on; Lautner's Coffee Dans, Henry's, and Googies defined an
architectural approach to scale, signage, and commercial interior spaces. The
term "Googie architecture" was coined in 1952 by noted "House
and Home" editor Douglas Haskell after he spotted the Lautner-designed
Googie's Coffee Shop while driving through Hollywood with renowned
architectural photographer Julius Shulman.
Haskell
used the term in a February 1952 House and Home magazine article on the
new design style and it stuck, although it soon came to be used as a derogatory
term in "serious" architectural circles.
Lautner
first defined an architectural solution to the scale, function, and public
space of car-oriented suburban architecture in his remodel of Henry's in
Glendale in 1947. Googie's Coffee Shop, designed in 1949, stood at the corner
of Sunset Strip and Crescent Heights, next to the famous Schwab's Pharmacy;
regrettably it was demolished in 1989. It was distinctive for its expansive
glass walls, arresting angular form, prominent roofline, and exuberant signage
oriented to car traffic: an advertisement for itself. Another key Lautner work
in the Googie genre was Henry's Restaurant (1957) in Pomona; its vaulted roof,
resembling an inverted boat hull, arched over the interior booths and the large
exposed beams (made from glue-laminated timber) carried through to the
exterior, where they supported a slatted awning that shaded the drive-in area.
Other architects spread the Modern aesthetic of the coffee shop/drive-in in
such as Tiny Naylor's (Lautner employer Douglas Honnold), Ship's (Martin Stern,
Jr.), and Norm's and Clock's (Armet and Davis.) Googie became part of the
American postwar Zeitgeist, but was ridiculed by the established
architectural community of the 1950s as superficial and vulgar. "Googie
was used as a synonym for undisciplined design and sloppy workmanship,"
reported historian Esther McCody. Not
until Robert Venturi's 1972 book "Learning from Las Vegas" did the
architectural mainstream even come close to validating Lautner's logic. The
style was denigrated by East Coast critics and Lautner's reputation suffered;
as a result he became wary of talking to the press and
it is notable that his 1986 UCLA oral history interviews include no references
at all to these early projects.
Harpel
Residence
This
elegant hillside house was designed and sited to take advantage of the
panoramic views of Los Angeles. Unfortunately, it was extensively altered by
later owners, including an unsympathetic second-story addition and the planting
of a large hedge beside the pool, which completely obscured the views it was meant
to frame, but it has recently been faithfully restored by the present owner,
Marc Haddawy, at a cost of over US$500,000.
The
Chemosphere
Lautner's
reputation was considerably restored by his groundbreaking design for the
Leonard J. Malin Residence, also known as the "Chemosphere" (1960),
which has become one of his best-known and most influential creations. Located
at 776 Torreyson Drive, West Hollywood, the house was designed for young
aerospace engineer Leonard Malin in 1960 and built by John de la Vaux. Lautner
ingeniously solved the problem of the 45-degree slope by siting the entire
house off the ground atop a 50-foot (15 m) concrete pillar that rests on a
massive concrete pad 20 feet (6.1 m) in diameter and 3 feet (0.91 m)
thick, buried into the rocky hillside. Halfway up the pillar, eight angled
steel "spokes" — bolted onto bosses formed onto the surface of
the column — splay out and up, supporting and stabilizing the outer rim of
the house, and the center of the pillar also houses the utility cables and
pipes. Lautner provided access from the driveway up the steep hillside by
installing a funicular, which terminates at a short sloping gangway that leads
up to the entrance. The house is octagonal in plan and lozenge-shape in
section, and is often described as a "flying saucer". Since there are
effectively no solid external walls — the entire outer "face" of
the house is eight large picture windows — the Chemosphere enjoys a
panoramic view over Hollywood. The massive, radiating glued laminated timber
roof bearers and crossbeams, which echo the keel and ribs of a ship hull, were
built by de la Vaux using the same type of mortise joints he had used in his
boat building.
Construction
of the highly unusual project saw the initial $30,000 budget blow out to over
$100,000, but fortunately Malin and Lautner were able to cover the shortfall by
obtaining corporate sponsorship, including funding from the Southern California
Gas Company and support from the Chemseal Corporation of America, who provided
sealants, plastics and other materials, in return for use of the house for
promotions and the right to name the house the "Chemosphere" for
advertising purposes. After passing through a succession of owners, the
building was rented out and occasionally used as a party venue and by the 1990s
the interior was considerably degraded. Fortunately, German publisher Benedikt
Taschen purchased the house in 2000 and restored it in collaboration with
architects Frank Escher and Ravi Gunewardena, earning them an award from the
Los Angeles Conservancy. The Chemosphere is a now a Los Angeles landmark and in
2008 a panel of experts commissioned by the Los Angeles Times rated the
Chemosphere as one of the "Top 10 houses of all time in L.A." It
is one of the most unusual and distinctive houses in the Los Angeles area and
its unique design has led to it being featured or referenced in many media
productions.
Reiner
Residence ("Silvertop")
As
his career developed Lautner increasingly explored the use of concrete and he
designed a number of homes for his more affluent clients that featured major
structural elements fabricated from reinforced concrete. the Reiner-Burchill
Residence, "Silvertop" (1956), was his first major exploration of the
sculptural possibilities of monolithic concrete, features a large arching
concrete roof over the main house and an eye-catching curved concrete driveway
that sweeps up and around the steep block. The project had a long and difficult
gestation — while it was still being built, original owner Kenneth Reiner
(with whom Lautner collaborated closely) was bankrupted by the fraudulent
dealings of his business partners and he was forced to sell the house. Lautner
also faced opposition from the Los Angeles building certification authorities,
who were dismayed by the radical design of the post-stressed concrete ramp,
which cantilivers out from the base of the house without any columns supporting
it from beneath, and is only four inches thick. Not surprisingly, the Los
Angeles building inspector demanded a static load test to prove that it could
take the weight of a car — a standoff that mirrored Lautner and Wright's
earlier contretemps with skeptical building authorities who demanded load tests
on Wright's famous "lotus pad" columns for the Johnson Wax Building.
In the event, Lautner's load calculations proved flawless and in fact the
instruments recorded more deflection in the concrete from the change in temperature
when the sun went down than they did from the weight of the sandbags loaded
onto the ramp to test it.
Desert
Hot Springs Motel (now known as Hotel Lautner)
Originally
designed in 1947 as a planned community of over 100 buildings, storefronts and
pools on 600 acres at Desert Hot Springs in the Coachella Valley, near Palm
Springs, California. Lautner's client was the famous movie director Lucien
Hubbard, the winner of the very first "Best Picture" Oscar for the
silent movie "Wings". After building the first four-unit prototype
and pool the project came to a halt and it was subsequently used for Hubbard's
stars and starlets as a getaway from Los Angeles; it gradually fell into disuse
and sat vacant for almost 20 yrs. After Hubbard's death in 1972 the 600 acres were
subdivided and sold off; the pool property burnt down and was bought by the
neighboring golf course to be rebuilt in a different design as their club
house. The prototype units were purchased by a buyer from San Diego but they
sat empty for another nine years until an interior designer renovated them and
put in kitchens and baths, although at some point the kitchens and baths were
destroyed and removed. This owner kept the property for almost twenty years
until the year 2000, renting out the rooms as apartments. It was then sold to
Steve Lowe, who briefly ran it as the Lautner Motel. After Lowe died in 2005
the property went through the courts as was finally put back on the market in
late 2006, when designers Ryan Trowbridge and Tracy Beckmann purchased it in
2007 for less than $400,000. The couple spent the next three-and-a-half years
renovating and restoring the property. Their efforts won the approval of the
Lautner Foundation, who sanctioned its renaming as the Hotel Lautner, in honor
of its designer. The hotel re-opened for business in September 2011.
Hope
Residence
The
17,500 sq ft (1,630 m2).
Dolores and Bob Hope Residence (1973), situated close to the Elrod Residence in
Palm Springs, features a massive undulating triangular roof, pierced by a large
circular central light shaft. The original house was destroyed by fire during
construction. Bob and Dolores Hope interfered extensively in the second design,
with the result that Lautner eventually distanced himself from the project. Although not well-known and rarely available
for public viewing (it is located within a gated community) it is one of the
largest and most visually striking of Lautner's domestic designs.
Arango
Residence ("Marbrisa")
Arguably
the pinnacle of Lautner's career, the vast (25,000 sq.ft) "Marbrisa"
in Acapulco was built for Mexican supermarket magnate Jeronimo Arango in 1973
and was jointly designed by Lautner and Helena Arahuete during her first year
with the firm. Perched on a hilltop site, with uninterrupted views across the
whole of Acapulco Bay, the main living quarters are surmounted by a large open
terrace with spectacular views of the beach and bay, encircled by a "sky
moat" which snakes around its edge; the terrace is itself topped by a
huge, sweeping semi-circular angled awning made of cast, reinforced concrete.
PIERRE KOENIG
Pierre Koenig was born
in San Francisco on October 17, 1925. Even as a boy, Koenig displayed a nascent
interest in architecture and Modernism. In 1939, the family moved to San
Gabriel, a Los Angeles suburb, and here, among a new group of friends who also
wanted to be architects, Koenig's earlier interest crystallized. Yet World War
II loomed, and at age 17 Koenig enlisted in the United States Army Advanced
Special Training Program, which offered a compressed 4-year college degree in 2
years. However, in 1943 the program was abruptly ended and after only one
semester of study at the University of Utah, School of Engineering, Koenig was
sent to basic training. From 1943-1946, Koenig served on the front lines in
France and Germany as a flash ranging observer, spotting enemy fire and
calculating their position, with the 292nd Field Artillery Observation
Battalion.
After the war, Koenig
returned to Los Angeles and applied to the University of Southern California
(USC), School of Architecture. Due the influx of returning GIs, there was a
two-year waiting list for admission, and Koenig spent this time studying at Pasadena City
College until he was finally admitted to USC in 1948. At this time,
USC was the leading architectural school in California, and a hotbed of new
ideas brought about by the aftermath of the war: ideas about how architecture
should respond to social issues, such as the population boom in Los Angeles and
the need for low-cost housing, and ideas about how to apply the new materials
and industrialized techniques of the wartime economy, such as mass-production
and pre-fabrication, to peacetime. Although Koenig struggled somewhat within
the strictures of a traditional academic framework, he certainly absorbed the
new ideas surrounding him, and they would continue to guide him throughout his
career.
After receiving his
B.Arch in 1952, Koenig worked both independently and for a number of other
architectural practices. In fact, Koenig had begun designing and building
houses while still a student. When a USC studio instructor rejected his design
for a steel house, questioning the applicability of steel to residential
architecture, Koenig decided to prove him wrong. His response, Koenig House No.
1, designed and built by Koenig in 1950, was constructed at a cost lower than a
traditional wood frame structure and earned him the American Institute of
Architects' "House and Home" Award of Merit. After graduation, Koenig
would design and build three more steel houses in rapid succession. During this
period he also worked for other practices, both to supplement his income and
for the professional experience required before taking the California licensing
exam. In 1950, the same year he built his first house, Koenig worked as a
draftsman for Raphael Soriano, who shared his interest in steel, doing the
presentation renderings for Soriano's unnumbered Case Study House. Koenig
subsequently worked for brief periods for Candreva and Jarrett, Edward H.
Fickett, Kistner, Wright and Wright, and finally in 1956 for Jones and Emmons,
on the Eichler X-100 steel model. Also in this period, Koenig began a
short-lived furniture business, designing and building modern case goods.
1957 was a watershed
year for Pierre Koenig. He was licensed; he received his first invitation to
participate in an international exhibition, the São Paulo Biennial; and Arts
and Architecture magazine published his designs for a "Low-cost Production
House" exemplifying his goal to produce "off-the-shelf" houses
as efficiently as automobiles. Most importantly though John Entenza invited him
to participate in Art and Architecture's Case Study House Program.
Case Study House # 21,
immediately followed by Case Study House # 22, defined Koenig's style and
brought him great attention. With their steel construction, open-planning, and
emphasis on the unity of nature and architecture, these two steel houses
exemplified the California aesthetic as being different from East Coast
Modernism. Despite their conceptual similarities, the two houses were quite
different from one another. Case Study House # 22, which quickly came to be
seen as the perfect manifestation of modernity in Los Angeles and of life in
post-war America in general, was a unique custom house, an exercise in
overcoming the engineering issues of a near vertical site. Case Study House
#21, on the other hand, was meant to be a prototype for affordable,
mass-producible housing, an embodiment of Koenig ’s belief in architecture as a
social study.
After this early
recognition, Koenig went on to have a long and prolific career as an architect,
designing and building over forty-three steel and glass houses, including
award-winning structures, such as Schwartz House and Koenig House No. 2, as
well as many residential additions and renovations and commercial buildings.
Throughout his long years of architectural practice Koenig never relinquished
the principles that led him to design and build his first house. He retained a
sense of mission, never losing his commitment to the social agenda of
Modernism. He truly believed that he could make people's lives better through
architecture.
In addition to his
architectural practice, Koenig was passionate about teaching. In 1964, Koenig
officially joined the faculty of the USC School of Architecture as an assistant
professor, having worked as an instructor there since 1961. He gained tenure
and promotion to Associate Professor in 1970 and then to Full Professor in
1997. Along with his teaching load, Koenig filled a variety of administrative
roles during his many years at USC including serving as Assistant Director of
the Institute of Building Research, and Director and Founder of both the
Natural Forces Laboratory and the undergraduate Building Science Program.
Koenig's work has had
a tremendous impact on contemporary architects worldwide. He was elected to the
College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 1971 and named an
Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2000. His work
has received numerous awards and has been celebrated in over one thousand
journal and periodical articles and more than seventy books. Exhibits in cities
around the world have featured his architecture. In 1989, a landmark
exhibition, Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study
Houses, held at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, included a
full-scale walk-through model of Case Study House #22. Pierre Koenig remained
active in both his architectural practice and his teaching until shortly before
his death in April 2004.
PAUL WILLIAMS
Paul Revere Williams was born
in Los Angeles on February 18, 1894 to Lila Wright Williams and Chester Stanley
Williams who had recently moved from Memphis with their young son, Chester, Jr.
When Paul was two years old his father died, and two years later his mother
died. The children were placed in separate foster homes. Paul was
fortunate to grow up in the home of a foster mother who devoted herself to his
education and to the development of his artistic talent.
At the turn of
the 20th century, Los Angeles was a vibrant multi-ethnic environment.
During Williams’ youth the California dream attracted people from the world
over, and they mixed together with little prejudice. Williams later
reported that he was the only African-American child in his elementary school,
and at Polytechnic High School he was part of the ethnic mélange.
However, in high school he experienced the first hint of racism when a teacher
advised him against pursuing a career in architecture, because he would have
difficulty attracting clients in the majority white community and the black
community could not provide enough work.
Williams did not give up his
goal. Confident in his strengths, he simultaneously pursued architectural
education and professional experience with Los Angeles’ leading firms, never
settling for less than perfection in his work and dignity in his relationships
with clients and colleagues. Earning academic accolades, competition
prizes and the respect of his employers, Williams was able to open his own
practice in 1922 and become the first African American member of the American
Institute of Architects in 1923.
During the 1920s and 1930s (including
the depression, which had little effect on his firm), his great success was in
designing homes for wealthy clients in the elite hillside subdivisions like Bel
Air, Brentwood, and Beverly Hills. Sought by entertainment industry
leaders, Williams became known as “Architect to the Hollywood Stars.”
Although residential design remained an important aspect of his practice,
commercial and institutional commissions became increasingly significant as did
his work beyond Southern California, across the nation and the world. In
the course of his five-decade career, Williams designed approximately 3000
buildings, served on many municipal, state and federal commissions, was active
in political and social organizations and earned the admiration and respect of
his peers. In 1957, he was the first African American elected a Fellow of
the American Institute of Architects.
Paul R. Williams retired from practice
in 1973 and died in 1980 at the age of 85.
A. QUINCY JONES
HAL LEVITT
HARWELL HAMILTON HARRIS
PAUL LASZIO
ZOLTAN PALI
LORCAN O'HERLY
RICHARD MEIER
BUFF STRAUB & HENSMAN ARCHITECTS
EDWARD FICKETT
EDWARD FICKETT
No comments:
Post a Comment