John Lautner

John Lautner learned architecture through hands-on-working experience rather than through classic academic training. He wanted ongoing change and passionate devotion. In 1933 he joined Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West. Later, with his own office in Los Angeles, he became the only one of Wright's pupils who not only adopted the master's ideas but developed them further. For 50 years Lautner experimented with new methods of construction and with inventive formal departures, and of his 188 designs no fewer than 113 were built, most of them private houses. The sheer daring of these designs stunned his contemporaries, and remains stunning now. Many of his buildings, such as the celebrated Chemosphere, a home positioned atop a single concrete column built above Los Angeles in 1960, came to be seen as the symbols of a new architecture of limitless possibilities.