by Katy Purviance on
04/11/08 @
09:00:54 pm
Categories:
Architects,
Articles | 221 words | 527 views
That’s a direct quote from architect John Lautner. He was talking about Los Angeles.
(I like him already.)
He stayed here only because the technologies of the aerospace and military industries had established a culture of innovation. Wealthy residents were willing to take risks and experiment, even when it came to something as elemental as their homes.
The architect wasn’t – and still isn’t – held in high regard among certain critics, who see his homes as symbols of L.A. excess. “If you’re going to run the risks he did and build what Frank Lloyd Wright called exuberance and others called vulgarities, you’re going to build some mistakes,” Olsberg said by phone from his home in Patagonia, Ariz. But even those mistakes are part of Lautner’s biggest legacy in Southern California, a spirit of invention. “That’s what is amazing,” Olsberg said. “There are clients and architects willing to run risks like nowhere else. That’s why Lautner stayed.”
In the forthcoming book, Olsberg details the architect’s childhood influences, his cantankerous and sometimes self-destructive personality, and the genius of his work: a sense of freedom that one feels upon entering Lautner’s best houses – “a form and spatial experience so ravishing,” Olsberg said, “it brings you to tears – to walk in and have the world open up.”
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