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Dictionary of Art
and Artists

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CHAPTER THREE
TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARCHITECTURE
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Part I.
ARCHITECTURE -
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
Part II. ARCHITECTURE -
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16, 17,
18,
19, 20,
Part III. ARCHITECTURE -
21,
22, 23,
24,
25, 26,
27,
28, 29
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ARCHITECTURE
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As early as the end of the 1920s,
groundbreaking concepts were being explored by various
architects and planners trying to build three-dimensional objects in the
most effective manner. Leading this new approach was Richard Buckminster
Fuller. Drawing their spatial ideas of design not from the tradition of
architecture, but from mathematic or biological sources they arrived at
a credo akin to "Less is more". Buckminster Fuller coined the word "Dymaxion",
a combination of the words "dynamic", "maximum" and "tension". Concerns
such as effectiveness regarding heat loss, building costs and
aerodynamics led to the development of dome-shaped structures, which
were to be manufactured in individual prefabricated units. In Fuller's
hexagonal "Dymaxion House" of 1929,
the roof, ceiling and floor were suspended from a
central mast. But an industry standard did not exist that would enable
construction companies to assume the risk and then manufacture such
transportable house modules.
After the War, when numerous scaffolding
companies in the United States were looking for conversion products,
there was renewed hope for the idea. Fuller drew up a new design on a
circular plan for Beech Aircraft Company in Wichita, Kansas, to be
assembled from approximately 200
separate pieces of aluminium, steel and acrylic glass.
It was to be sold for $6,500
and transported in a cylindrical package. In theory, the
house was intended to be built single-handedly. The plan failed mainly
due to the fact that the construction union adamantly defended itself
against an attempt to stop installation work from being done at the
construction site. Only two prototypes were built. Fuller, however,
continued working on an optimized structure and developed the "geodetic
dome". Finely structured domes were developed and constructed out of
individual rods and based on an icosahedron. The icosahedron's
pentagonal sections were divided into smaller triangular areas, whose
nodal points were in turn, all located on one spherical surface. Walter Bauersfeld
had already built the Zeiss Planetarium according to this
principle, though here the strut disappeared under the concrete coating
and served only for reinforcing. According to Fuller, the sphere was
more than a form for a planetarium. For him, it simply presented the
best way to optimize volume and surface cladding and at the same time,
achieve maximum rigidity. Now Fuller was able to more successfully plan
and realize geodetic domes of this design. A record in construction was
achieved with the building having a diameter of
125 metres for the Union Tank Car Company repair
shop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A determining factor for some customers
may have been the fact that it was
quite cost-efficient to erect the dome.
Fuller's vision went much further however, and he outlined an
idea for a climatic dome for Manhattan, which would have covered the
better half of the island. In his writings, he appealed for ecological
methods of construction, as he felt planning and the economy always
resulted in the exploitation of natural resources. This culminated in
1969 in his striking description of our planet, in which he delivered
the missing "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth". A spherical form can
be made without a bracing latticework, particularly if it is to be clad
with plastic sheeting. Consequently, in airship production for example,
there are the rigid Zeppelins as well as the self-supporting "blimps".
As early as 1917,
Frederick William Lancaster had been experimenting with inflatable
buildings and even registered a patent for a roof construction supported
by air pressure. During the Second World War, inflatable buildings were
used by both Allied and German troops.
In 1941, California
architect Wallace Neff used a balloon in order to produce a concrete "airform"
construction. Concrete was spray-applied onto the almost 3.5-metre-high
balloon. After this dried, the thin shell could be reinforced with mesh
wire, insulated and coated again with another layer of concrete. When
deflated, the balloon could be removed through the house door and used
again. The first "Bubble Houses" were built using two bubbles, to ensure
enough living space, and were built for employees of the United States
Government Defense Housing Cooperation in Falls Church, Virginia. The
idea of these spherical houses was very popular, because they were
economical to build and were energy-efficient. However, their external
form met with divergent opinions. In North America, there were only a
few of these houses built, but thousands were constructed elsewhere in
the world, such as in Pakistan, Egypt, West Africa and Brazil. Walter W.
Bird further explored the original idea of using the inflatable balloon as a building. In 1948,
he designed and built the "Radome" at the Cornell
Aeronautical Laboratory, as a protective shell for radar equipment. The
spherical, pneumatic construction was tough and stable and could protect
sensitive technical equipment from weather. At the same time, the
material was permeable to radar waves and could be easily and quickly
dismantled. In 1956, Bird
founded his own firm, Birdair Structure Company, in order to continue
exploring pneumatic and lightweight constructions. The company developed
countless models for agriculture, sport and leisure facilities, trade
fairs and the military. Architects were at first very critical of the
material, and then a change in fire regulations blocked any further use
of the structures. The new designs of mobile buildings did not easily
conform to regulations that had been developed for permanent structures.
Therefore, Birdair was only able to realize further projects as
exhibition buildings.
In the mid-fifties, the plastic industry saw further possibilities
for expansion in architecture and construction. Until then, only
small-scale decorative or installation elements were manufactured out of
plastic. It was now theoretically possible to manufacture many more
components out of the new materials. In 1955-1957, the Monsanto Company built a new research
centre on the Creve Coeur grounds in St. Louis, using 80
different plastic applications, including even laminated
plastic as a construction element. At the same time, the company
commissioned architects from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
to explore other possible uses in housing construction. Thus, a design
was created for a free-form house, which Disneyland realized in
1957 in only
5 months as the "house of the
future". To increase rigidity, multiple curved surfaces were planned for
the construction of the outer shell. The main feature, however, at least
for the public, lay in the electrical finesse of the building's
installation.
What was missing in the "House of the Future" was a vision of life
and living together in the future. In 1933,
Frederick Kiesler planned an exhibition building,
which he named "Space House", for the furniture manufacturer Modernage
Furniture Company in New York. The Space House was to be built using
self-supporting shells. However, after the War, he directed his
attention to studies on an "Endless House".
"Machine-age houses are split-ups of cubicles, one box next to
another, one box below another, one box above another, until they grow
into tumors of skyscrapers. The coming of the 'endless house' is
inevitable in a world coming to an end. It is the last refuge for man as man." "The 'endless
house' is called the 'endless', because all ends meet, and meet
continuously." In 1959, Kiesler built a true-to-scale model out of mesh wire that he clad with
concrete. Unfortunately, he was never able to realize this vision in an
actual building. Politics were focused mainly on the power struggle
between the world's leading nations, which, since the first Sputnik's
flight in 1957, was also
being carried out as a "Space Race". America felt the pressure after
Yuri Gagarin's space flight from Baikonur Cosmodrome in April
1961. Alan Shepard also left the
Earth's atmosphere in May, but he did not manage to orbit the planet.
Also in April, the American President John F. Kennedy requested the
allocation of enormous sums of money during his "Man on the Moon"
Address. First, to match the Soviets and possibly outdo them by flying
to the moon, and finally, to "...
win the battle that is now going on around the world
between freedom and tyranny". In his opinion, it was time
"... for this nation to take a
clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the
key to our future on Earth." After this, progress in space became a
gauge for the nation's future prospects, and the shape of space capsules
served as a model for everyday design. Living-room lighting fixtures
soon resembled rockets, televisions and space helmets.
An important invention for the successful realization of the
"spacewalk" was a spacesuit that offered astronauts shelter similar to a
mini-apartment. Mobile living-forms were now turning into new forms of
existence. In the fantastic designs by Michael Webb, like his projects "Cushicles"
from 1966 or "Suitaloon"
from 1968, people are
enveloped by coverings resembling spacesuits. Through technical
developments to the suit and the furniture that went along with it,
mankind was supposed to be able to survive without the conventional
world.
Michael Webb, together with Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis
Crompton, David Greene and Ron Herron, was a member of the British
architecture group "Archigram", who began publishing their ideas in 1961 in the magazine of
the same name. First created as a reaction to the developments in
post-war architecture, Archigram became the mouthpiece for the Utopian
fantasy visions of the astronaut age and pop art design. Preference was given to
inflatable forms, and sketches were made for inflatable amusement
centres and buildings. The idea of permanence, so inherent to
architecture, was thus fundamentally questioned. Entire cities seemed to
move like giant arthropods and resembled alien settlements. Architecture
became a part of everyday culture with the help of comic-style collages
and drawings. Not a single Archigram design was ever built, but the
group influenced an entire generation of architects.
It is worth noting that many notions of Utopia were much less aimed
at mega-structures for the masses than at solutions for individuals and
their direct environment who were only supposed to communicate with the
outside world via media. The artificial world corresponds to the world
of an inhabitant, who, without the possibility of exchange with the
world outside, merely revolves around his own "inner orbit".
The
architecture group Haus-Rucker-Co, founded in
1967, united artistic and architectural approaches to create thought-provoking new designs.
With the "Gelbes Herz" ("Yellow Heart") object from
1968, the group built a pneumatic
room, which was to alter the visitor's sense of awareness. The mobile
station offered a lounge chair for two persons and coulg be entered via
a channel made of three inflatable rubber rings. The capsule's air
chambers were filled with air in a pulsating rhythm, so that the
interior would grow or decrease in size in dilating intervals. Points
printed on the shell varied between milky coloured spots and clear
patterns. As with many other similar objects, the effect, however, was
rather disappointing.
Finnish architect Matti Suuronen designed a transportable house in 1968, which was to have an
entirely practical function, and its compactness was mainly conceived as
a vacation residence or ski hut for up to eight persons. Designed for
series production from the onset, the "Futuro House" was made of fibre-reinforced
plastic that served as the material for the shell of the ellipsoid. This
enabled a very lightweight construction that could be transported via helicopter from site to site at will. In Finland
20 Futuros were built, and severa others were
constructed in the rest of the world by other licensees. The oil crisis
of 1973 and the resulting
increase in the price of plastic materials soon put an end to production
and the Futuro Corporation, established in the US, ceased operation in 1974.
With the publication of "The Limits to Growth" by the Club of Rome,
plastic and technology-based Utopias began losing credibility, and
durable concepts using natural materials then took precedence.
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Richard Buckminster Fuller.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
R. Buckminster Fuller, in full Richard Buckminster Fuller
(born July 12, 1895, Milton, Mass., U.S.—died July 1, 1983,
Los Angeles), U.S. engineer and architect who developed the
geodesic dome, the only large dome that can be set directly
on the ground as a complete structure, and the only
practical kind of building that has no limiting dimensions
(i.e., beyond which the structural strength must be
insufficient). Among the most noteworthy geodesic domes is
the United States pavilion for Expo 67 in Montreal. Also a
poet and a philosopher, he was noted for unorthodox ideas on
global issues.
Life
Fuller was descended from a long line of New England
Nonconformists, the most famous of whom was his great-aunt,
Margaret Fuller, the critic, teacher, woman of letters and
cofounder of The Dial, organ of the Transcendentalist
movement. Fuller was twice expelled from Harvard University
and never completed his formal education. He saw service in
the U.S. Navy during World War I as commander of a
crash-boat flotilla. In 1917 he married Anne Hewlett,
daughter of James Monroe Hewlett, a well-known architect and
muralist. Hewlett had invented a modular construction system
using a compressed fibre block, and after the war Fuller and
Hewlett formed a construction company that used this
material (later known as Soundex, a Celotex product) in
modules for house construction. In this operation Fuller
himself supervised the erection of several hundred houses.
The construction company
encountered financial difficulties in 1927, and Fuller, a
minority stockholder, was forced out. He found himself
stranded in Chicago, without income, alienated, dismayed,
confused. At this point in his life, Fuller resolved to
devote his remaining years to a nonprofit search for design
patterns that could maximize the social uses of the world’s
energy resources and evolving industrial complex. The
inventions, discoveries, and economic strategies that
followed were interim factors related to that end.
In 1927, in the course of
the development of his comprehensive strategy, he invented
and demonstrated a factory-assembled, air-deliverable house,
later called the Dymaxion house, which had its own
utilities. He designed in 1928, and manufactured in 1933,
the first prototype of his three-wheeled omnidirectional
vehicle, the Dymaxion car. This automobile, the first
streamlined car, could cross open fields like a jeep,
accelerate to 120 miles (190 km) per hour, make a 180-degree
turn in its own length, carry 12 passengers, and average 28
miles per gallon (12 km per litre) of gasoline. In 1943, at
the request of the industrialist Henry Kaiser, Fuller
developed a new version of the Dymaxion car that was planned
to be powered by three separate air-cooled engines, each
coupled to its own wheel by a variable fluid drive. The
projected 1943 Dymaxion, like its predecessor, was never
commercially produced.
Assuming that there is in
nature a vectorial, or directionally oriented, system of
forces that provides maximum strength with minimum
structures, as is the case in the nested tetrahedron
lattices of organic compounds and of metals, Fuller
developed a vectorial system of geometry that he called
“Energetic-Synergetic geometry.” The basic unit of this
system is the tetrahedron (a pyramid shape with four sides,
including the base), which, in combination with octahedrons
(eight-sided shapes), forms the most economic space-filling
structures. The architectural consequence of the use of this
geometry by Fuller was the geodesic dome, a frame the total
strength of which increases in logarithmic ratio to its
size. Many thousands of geodesic domes have been erected in
various parts of the world, the most publicized of which was
the United States exhibition dome at Expo 67 in Montreal.
One houses the tropical exhibit area of the Missouri
Botanical Garden in St. Louis; another, the Union Tank Car
Company’s dome, was built in 1958 in Baton Rouge, La. This
dome, at the time of its construction the largest clear-span
structure in existence, is 384 feet (117 m) in diameter and
116 feet (35 m) in height.
Other inventions and
developments by Fuller included a system of cartography that
presents all the land areas of the world without significant
distortion; die-stamped prefabricated bathrooms;
tetrahedronal floating cities; underwater geodesic-domed
farms; and expendable paper domes. Fuller did not regard
himself as an inventor or an architect, however. All of his
developments, in his view, were accidental or interim
incidents in a strategy that aimed at a radical solution of
world problems by finding the means to do more with less.
Comprehensive and
anticipatory design initiative alone, he held—exclusive of
politics and political theory—can solve the problems of
human shelter, nutrition, transportation, and pollution; and
it can solve these with a fraction of the materials now
inefficiently used. Moreover, energy, ever more available,
directed by cumulative information stored in computers, is
capable of synthesizing raw materials, of machining and
packaging commodities, and of supplying the physical needs
of the total global population.
Fuller was a research
professor at Southern Illinois University (Carbondale) from
1959 to 1968. In 1968 he was named university professor, in
1972 distinguished university professor, and in 1975
university professor emeritus. Queen Elizabeth II awarded
Fuller the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. He also
received the 1968 Gold Medal Award of the National Institute
of Arts and Letters.
Assessment
Fuller—architect, engineer, inventor, philosopher,
author, cartographer, geometrician, futurist, teacher, and
poet—established a reputation as one of the most original
thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. He
conceived of man as a passenger in a cosmic spaceship—a
passenger whose only wealth consists in energy and
information. Energy has two phases—associative (as atomic
and molecule structures) and dissociative (as
radiation)—and, according to the first law of
thermodynamics, the energy of the universe cannot be
decreased. Information, on the other hand, is negatively
entropic; as knowledge, technology, “know-how,” it
constantly increases. Research engenders research, and each
technological advance multiplies the productive wealth of
the world community. Consequently, “Spaceship Earth” is a
regenerative system whose energy is progressively turned to
human advantage and whose wealth increases by geometric
increments.
Fuller’s book Nine Chains
to the Moon (1938) is an outline of his general
technological strategy for maximizing the social
applications of energy resources. He further developed this
and other themes in such works as No More Secondhand God
(1962), Utopia or Oblivion (1969), Operating Manual for
Spaceship Earth (1969), Earth, Inc. (1973), and Critical
Path (1981).
Robert W. Marks
Encyclopædia
Britannica
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Richard Buckminster Fuller. United States Pavillion at the Word's Fair
in Montreal, 1967

Richard Buckminster Fuller. Beech Aircraft Factory model house in
Wichita, Kansas, 1946

Richard Buckminster Fuller. Union Tank Car Company repair shop building,
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1956-1957
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Wallace Neff.
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Wallace Neff
Wallace Neff (1895 – June 8, 1982) was an architect based in
Southern California and was largely responsible for
developing the region's distinct architectural style
referred to as "California" style. Neff was a student of
architect Ralph Adams Cram and drew heavily from the
architectural styles of both Spain and the Mediterranean as
a whole, gaining extensive recognition from the number of
celebrity commissions, notably Pickfair, the mansion
belonging originally to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.
Wallace Neff was born to Edwin Neff and Nettie McNally,
daughter of Chicago printing tycoon Andrew McNally
(Rand-McNally Corporation). Since Grandfather McNally had
moved to Altadena, California in 1887 and founded Rancho La
Mirada, La Mirada, California was Neff's birthplace.
However, he spent a great deal of time at the Altadena
residence, a grand Queen Anne Victorian mansion which looked
from the hillside community down to the Pacific Ocean. It
would become little wonder that the young Neff would take up
an interest in architecture given his surroundings on
Millionaire's Row (Mariposa Avenue). At age nine Wallace had
moved to Europe with his family only to return to the U.S.
at the outbreak of World War I.
His interest in architecture saw him studying under the
revered Ralph Adams Cram in Massachusetts. He eventually
returned to California and took up residence in Altadena
while serving as a shipyard draftsman in Wilmington.
Eventually he found himself ready for the architectural
realm creating designs of the Spanish Medieval period
including his own home Parish of St. Elizabeth of Hungary
Roman Catholic Church, established 1918 in Altadena. His
gift to the Parish as well as the community was the design
of the Church building finished and dedicated in 1926.
The church is of Spanish
Medieval design including a bell tower which is patterned
after a Spanish watchtower. The view from its broad portals
at 100 feet gave an enormous panorama not only of the
Southern California country side, now blocked by the
since-built steeple of Westminster Presbyterian Church to
its south, but an expansive view of the San Gabriel
Mountains to its north which boast peaks up to 7,000 feet in
altitude. The building is reminiscent of the Serra Missions
with its arched south porch and terra cotta tiles. It has
high stucco-on-concrete walls with small, high stain glass
windows. Below each window is a taller stain glass window
with biblical depictions leaded into each one.
It boasts a Spanish tile
roof and a massive plank wood arched front double door. The
interior is vaulted to heights in excess of 50 feet. Across
its ceiling are three broad rough hewn trusses acting to
support the gabled ceiling. In actuality, the building's
superstructure is built of iron girders. Other details on
the exterior are broad wing sweeping walls and exaggerated
window sills with wooded bars. These features become an
important part of his developing style. The Saint Elizabeth
church building is the only house of worship ever designed
by Neff, and has the distinction of being the oldest
building in use for Catholic worship in the southland.
To the parish plant Neff
added the priests' rectory, the convent for the Holy Name
Sisters who taught at the school, and a pet project, a
shrine to Saint Theresa of Avila (1929) which features the
true style of his architecture. This makes Saint Elizabeth
Parish a rare collection of Wallace Neff works.
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Wallace Neff. The Goodyear
Tire and Rubber Company Balloon House in Litchfield Park, Arizona, 1945.
Wallace Neff.
Airform House, 1946

Wallace Neff. Andrew Neff
house in Pasadema, California, 1946
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Walter W. Bird.

Walter W. Bird.
"Radome" on the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory
grounds in Buffalo, New York, 1948

Walter W. Bird.
"Swimshelter" at the planner's garden, Buffalo, New York, 1957
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John Lautner.
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John Edward Lautner
John Edward Lautner (16 July 1911 – 24 October 1994) was an
influential American architect whose work in Southern
California combined progressive engineering with humane
design and dramatic space-age flair.
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) and was never completed, although 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). 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.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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John Lautner.
"Chemosphere" house for Leonard Malin, Hollywood, California, 1960.
"Chemosphere" house. Plan

John Lautner.
Sheats Apartments (L'Horizon)

John Lautner.
Segel House 1979

John Lautner.
House for Jeronimo Arango in Acopulco, Mexico, 1973

John Lautner.
Goldstein House in Los Angeles, California, 1963

John Lautner.
Goldstein House in Los Angeles, California, 1963

Goldstein House. Plan
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Michael Webb.
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Michael Webb
Michael Webb (born 3 March 1937 in Henley-on-Thames) is
an English architect. He was a founding member of the 1960s
Archigram Group, a collection of six young architects who
were determined to shake up what they saw as a stodgy
British architectural profession. Using a magazine format,
Archigram promoted a radical rethinking of the concept of
architecture, using inflatable structures, clothing-like
environments, bright colors and cartoon-like drawing
techniques that followed contemporary graphic and
technological trends.
Webb studied architecture
at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, taking seventeen
years to complete a five-year curriculum. Webb moved to the
United States in 1965 to teach at Virginia Tech, and has
since taught architecture at the Rhode Island School of
Design, Columbia University, Barnard College, Cooper Union,
University of Buffalo and Princeton University.
He has also put on many
exhibitions in Europe and America. His latest exhibition,
Two Journeys, opened in the spending the fall semester
learning about them through conversations and their
drawings. The Two Journeys exhibition gave Webb an
opportunity for the students to learn about him and his
work. The exhibit was mounted and read like the pages of a
book. It centered around two main themes: a train of thought
deriving from the Reyner Banham article A Home is not a
House (1965) and a study of linear perspective projection.
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Michael Webb. Model of "Cushicle", 1966

Michael Webb. "Suitaloon", 1968
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Matti Suuronen.
Matti Suuronen (b. 1933 in Finland) architect.
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Matti Suuronen. "Futuro House"
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Matti Suuronen. "Futuro House"
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Matti Suuronen. "Futuro House" in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1970

"Futuro Hous". The interior
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Matti Suuronen. "Futuro House" Hatteras
Island North Carolina, 1968
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