12 houses by John Lautner, the visionary of the American domestic space

In Lautner, concrete becomes the poetic form of space. This is how we could describe the Reiner-Berchill Residence, where the most emblematic space is the large living room defined through a single 25-meter sail of prestressed concrete. Here, technical innovation draws a surface related to the steep topography, opening up to the landscape thanks to a pool that defines a void in front of the living room. The house generally gathers curvilinear walls that envelop the space, creating a continuous exchange between inside and outside. In the wide overhanging roofs, wrightian echoes can be seen; however, in Lautner these become light blades that complement nature, while the brick partitions become part of the ground.

Setting for some scenes in Tom Ford's film A Single Man, the Schaffer House restores a protected space without closing itself off from nature. Using redwood, large windows, brick and concrete volumes, the architecture fully interprets the concept of organicism and its relationship to the natural context. This can be observed from the interior spaces of the house, which take the form of a tent in the woods built of wood. Mostly horizontal, however, the house remains compact, where the plants surrounding the house seem to determine the boundaries within which the domestic space moves. The red brick walls then build visual axes that produce suggestive outward perspectives while providing privacy from the street.

From Laugier to Bruno Taut, nature has always provided design inspiration.  With the Pearlman Cabin in Idyllwild, a small town in the San Jacinto Mountains of Southern California, John Lautner, in 1957, designed a vacation home within a forest where he and his clients created a place capable of synthesizing nature and domestic space.  When entering the living room, the architecture eliminates the boundary with the forest, which becomes an integral part of the house: the large living room, along with open spacing for the kitchen, sleeping beds, dining table, and music area, configure an almost circular unified area that opens onto the natural slope of the lot. Six cedar logs serve as pillars for large glass windows that are emblematic of the project.  Inside the cabin, the cedar verticals serve to merge the interior with the forest outside, immersing the viewer in the natural world.

The Garcia House is almost entirely glazed, its shape reminiscent of a teardrop thinning within the California landscape. Thus, the clean geometry presents a chimney of Wrightian memory, where the connotative element is undoubtedly the steel structure. Slender diagonal columns and softly colored beams support the residence, which is suspended among the verdant hills, where the large stained glass windows have also made it famous under the name Rainbow House. Here Lautner's architecture expresses its scenic value, and perhaps because of this almost theatrical component, this house became one of the main sets of the Lethal Weapon films.

An octagonal house, where a radial distribution accommodates all the home's spaces, opens 360 degrees to the territory. Conceived for a steeply sloping site, Lautner locates the design solution by elevating the residence via a single pillar, making the domestic space accessible via an uphill walkway. Looking at the iconic image of the Chemosphere is immediate the idea of the mushroom columns of Wright's Johnson Wax, or even Buckminster Fuller's technical experiments. Therefore, Chemosphere synthesizes an architecture between technology, creative ability, and form management. This combination thus produces a futurist architecture that transforms technological innovation into new plastic potential.

The Wolff Residence is often described as the homage Lautner conceived for one of his mentor's most famous works: the Fallingwater.
This dwelling generates a close relationship with its topographical and textural context, anchoring itself to the hillside and leaving space for vegetation. Stone walls draw the discontinuous perimeter of the house, where a composition of rectangles defines the project's geometry. Here, the design of several details and the heaviness of the prominent overhanging roofs are in continuity with Wright's experimentation, which, however, finds in Lautner a greater dynamism in the tension between the parts and the interplay between architecture and nature.

This house has sinuous and enveloping forms, where the main element is a circular space where a unitary concrete roof, cut by glass blades, stands out.
For Lautner, this house succeeds in synthesizing an idea of domesticity that marries nature; in fact, elements of the latter enter the home's space entirely. As if it were a topographical work, during the construction phases, the rocks of the site were not removed, producing a series of rooms in which rocks emerged from the floor and walls.
The house thus appears to have been excavated within the Palm Springs hillside, heavily rooted to the ground, from which it has subtracted only the soil to reveal the minerality of the stones.

The Tyler house is built on a solid geometric matrix and material honesty that combines wood and concrete. 
The triangle is the recurring theme in the floor plan; from this, the various directionality and element of the interior spaces are disposed. Thus, the main corners of the plan become opportunities to unique details, such as the fireplace in the living room or a series of openings along the concrete volume. At the same time, the triangle becomes a distributive theme in the subdivision of further interior spaces, creating an echo of the compositional matrix.  The dwelling is rooted in the ground, while the living room and terrace jut out over the garden, supported by the fireplace element, which also becomes the supporting pillar of the house.

Like Garcia House, Sheats Residence constructs a space with a strong scenic atmosphere. The house has been set for numerous films, such as The Big Lebowski, and music videos, including a Snoop Dogg single, showing to the general public one of the works that spanned Lautner's entire design life. Sheats Residence has a history of continuous refinement by the architect, who worked there until his death. Here, everything is designed by Lautner's hand. The geometry of the triangle also returns here, reverberating in the space, in the shapes of the pool, or in the arrangement of the furniture. Among these, the large coffered cover of the living room takes center stage, generating a unique spatiality that projects outward.

If the Elrod Residence is rooted in rock, the Walstrom, on the other hand, is the poster child for a light, all-wood architecture that seems to float in the bush.
The dwelling is compact, with a single pitch cutting through the roof. Leaning against a steep wall, Walstrom Residence uses the height difference to distribute the house over two levels. The primary access is on the upper floor, where the living area houses a raised mezzanine that builds a wooden volume. Here, the windows designed by the vertical rhythm of the window and door frames see oblique wooden bands. These act as the only decorative element, drawing the facade and breaking the tectonic construction of the volume.

Lautner is among the Modern architects who succeeded through their poetry in making the plasticity of concrete a foundational character of architecture. In Marbrisa Residence, the curved and free forms lie on the top of a hill, leaving the exposed concrete to build the poetry of large curved surfaces moving through space. According to Lautner, this house is "A large, open terrace so that all you had was the beauty of the Acapulco Bay and the sky and the mountains. You don’t feel you’re in a building at all. You’re out in space. With the beauty of nature."
Mabrisa Residence, in its autonomy, results from the emptiness it leaves, drawn by concrete elements and curvatures of space.

Characterized by a large canopy that weighs down the space of the house, the crowning bends, assuming a shape that generates spatial tension between the ground and the concrete roof. The latter bends and overhangs on three sides, then connects to the ground in as many. The rooms, distributed circularly, build an inhabited edge that leaves the center empty for a large open-air terrace. Here a conical volume takes on the function of a chimney, bringing it to a monumental scale, thus placing itself in dialogue with the large oculus. The opening illuminates the interior of the dwelling and characterizes the central void, while lightening the roof.