The legacy of John Lautner, 'lyrical technologist' architect

By Alan Hess
Progressive Architecture, Dec., 1994

(Excerpts only)

....What made Lautner important, however, was that unlike many of Wright's early apprentices, he escaped Wright's spell, set out on his own, and spent 55 years in a highly personal and productive exploration of organic architecture's possibilities.

....Lautner had sharp words for commercialism's clammy hand on architecture, yet he was the designer who produced a series of drive-in restaurants that helped shape the face of the emerging car-culture city.

....He went on to help make the city a crucible of Modern design in the 1940s and 1950s.

....His Henry's drive-in of 1947, in Glendale, and his Googie's of 1949, on the Sunset Strip, inspired the modernistic "California coffee shop" that spread across the country in the 1950s.

Lautner left the commercial world largely behind in 1957, devoting his inventiveness to houses. ....The sprawling Silvertop in Silver Lake displayed the kinds of gizmos that gave the architect a Buck Rogers reputation: walls of glass that silently disappeared at the touch of a button, high-tech toilets that flushed without a whisper, solid walls that privoted to become windows....