Diamonds Are Forever

Built like a mushroom atop a concrete post, the Chemosphere is characteristically John Lautner. Like most of his projects, the 1960 house manages to completely avoid facades in the traditional sense, as ceilings and walls constantly angle into one another. Choosing another image, Nicholas Olsberg compares the typical Lautner design to a "bird that has landed or is just about to leave the earth."

Such poetry may be easily perceived in person, but it's nearly impossible to translate two-dimensionally. "I almost despair of architectural exhibitions," Olsberg says. He should know. From 2001 to 2004, he served as director of the Centre Canadien d'Architecture in Montreal. He also nursed a Lautner fascination for many years before the Hammer Museum, part of the University of California at Los Angeles, brought him in to co-curate a soaring reappraisal of the maverick modernist. "Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner" opens there July 13.

His fellow curator, also the exhibition's designer, is Swiss-trained Frank Escher of the experimental Escher GuneWardena Architecture. Both men had interacted with the master personally, but it was Escher who edited a Lautner book and subsequently served as an archivist and a board member for the John Lautner Foundation. Several years ago, Escher GuneWardena burnished the Chemosphere for publisher Benedikt Taschen and his wife at that time.

Most of Lautner's output consists of private houses rarely on view. A Frank Lloyd Wright protégé, Lautner was also responsible for the Googie's coffeeshops, described by some as looking like Taliesin West on steroids. Fast forward, and you find the offspring of those Googie's buildings in Quentin Tarantino movies, but the originals, unfortunately, are gone. In the 1980's, when filmmaker Murray Grigor was shooting his landmark Pride of Place, an eight-part architectural-history tour for PBS, he says his collaborators nixed Lautner as a "groovy Hollywierdo." He was flying far, far off the radar when he died in 1994 at age 83.

The Hammer isn't kidding with the "Between Earth and Heaven" part of the exhibition title. Embattled but rarely earthbound, the uncommonly lyrical Lautner was a pioneer of expressive curves. "Because of its ambition, the work risks vulgarity," Olsberg concedes. "It's so easy to sensationalize. Exuberance, flamboyance, and extravagance are things that did not scare John Lautner the least bit." Fortunately, that's no problem in post-Tarantino L.A., where the line between low and high culture is thin and getting thinner.

What was a problem, Escher notes, is the fact that the buildings are especially "complex and difficult to understand from drawings and photos." So the curators commissioned a suite of partial models at a scale so enormous that, were the copies complete, they would not have fit into 8,000 square feet of galleries. The largest model measures 17 feet long and 4 feet high, with rooms big enough for visitors to project themselves into the spaces, almost like touring the actual sites.

Beyond each model, a digitally printed mural approximates the appropriate backdrop. "You look through our model of the Elrod house and see an abstracted view of the desert," Escher explains. That's the Palm Springs property best known from the Diamonds Are Forever scene in which—as Grigor adds in his Scottish brogue—"007 gets dusted up by Bambi and Thumper."

Nature was always a primary influence for Lautner, who deployed his camera "the way other people use a sketchbook," Escher says. And Lautner's shots of the incredible forms he observed in nature will be projected, as if for one of his own slide shows, in a small darkened room at the exhibition entrance.

Select houses will come even more sharply into focus in the main galleries, where specially commissioned videos by none other than Grigor will be shown at dimensions as large as 8 by 12 feet. Each video lasts two to four minutes, introducing the architectural element of passing time, though visitors are not necessarily expected to pause and watch straight through. The intended effect is that of a site visit. "You stand still and let your eyes move around—or let your eyes stand still as the light moves around you," Olsberg suggests. "That's when you will really understand the space."

After months of filming, Grigor has come to consider Lautner, with his open-ended swooping forms, as a kind of missing link between Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry. The latter recently sat for Grigor's camera, and that interview will appear in a documentary scheduled to debut with a Hammer Museum screening on September 18.

From top: L.A.'s Chemosphere, built in 1960. Perhaps Lautner's most lavish furnishings, at Mar Brisas. Butt-joined window glass blurring the demarcation between indoors and out at the 1963 Sheats-Goldstein house, L.A.