ARCHITECTURE
 

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.

Richard Buckminster Fuller.
 

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

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

Wallace Neff.

 

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.

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

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

John Lautner.
 

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

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

Michael Webb.
 

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.

Michael Webb. Model of "Cushicle", 1966





Michael Webb. "Suitaloon", 1968

Matti Suuronen.



Matti Suuronen (b. 1933 in Finland) architect.

Matti Suuronen. "Futuro House"

 

Matti Suuronen. "Futuro House"


 

Matti Suuronen. "Futuro House" in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1970





"Futuro Hous". The interior

 

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