John Lautner

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 painter.

John Edward Lautner (16 July 1911 – 24 October 1994) was an American architect.

Lautner was born in Marquette, Michigan, in 1911 and was of mixed Austrian and Irish descent.

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 idyllic 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.

Following an apprenticeship in the mid-1930s with the Taliesin Fellowship led by Frank Lloyd Wright, Lautner opened his own practice in 1938, where he worked for the remainder of his career.

Lautner practiced primarily in California, and the majority of his works were residential.

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 Taliesin 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.

John 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.

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.

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 & Architecture, 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.

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).

A Lautner-designed retreat for Oboler's wife was eventually built.

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 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.

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 is perhaps best remembered for his contribution to the development of the Googie style, as well as for several Atomic Age houses he designed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which include the Leonard Malin House, Paul Sheats House, and Russ Garcia House.