Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner Hammer Museum Los Angeles, California

“Standing on a site, I seek its particular and unique expression with all the senses....until the natural setting, the character of the owners, and the design harmoniously become a single idea.”
John Lautner

Lautner’s adventures in structure, line, siting, and materials were undertaken in a quest not for effect but for spatial poetry. Believing that a building should awaken a transcendental understanding of the environment through conversation with its setting, he sought an architecture in which the sublime becomes familiar and the familiar sublime.

Between Earth and Heaven journeys through Lautner’s world of ideas: their genesis, growth, and complex interactions. What we discover is a mind at once disciplined and structured, yet subtle and fluid. This is reflected in an architecture that is rigorous and at the same time flexible. The tension makes the subsequent histories of his completed buildings especially interesting.
The exhibition looks in depth at 6 works that capture - at different scales, in different topographies - the essence of Lautner’s conversation with space.

Beyer Residence, Los Angeles, 1983
At the Beyer Residence the concrete structure straddles a rocky point on the Malibu shore, following the form of the rock pools, waves, or clouds to shape space, bringing a fixed and sheltering room into conversation with mobile, ever-changing vistas of sea and cloud.

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