[continued from Part 1, here]

IF ONE DESIGNER SYMBOLIZES the reality of California diversity — and our struggle to come to terms with it — it is John Lautner.

Lautner was part of the Organic design movement, which constituted the strongest alternative to the European International Style in California at midcentury — a movement which is not widely remembered today. Organic ideas were seen in every phase of design, from architecture, weaving, painting, furniture and cabinetry, to graphics. Growing from Frank Lloyd Wright's output after 1900, it was well-rooted and thrived through the century. (Wright himself continued to work in California into the 1950s.) Like the work of European-influenced designers, Organic design is technology-based, but conceives of the machine's role differently — the forms, materials, and patterns of nature are just as prominent as those of the machine. And though the work was sometimes notably Wrightian in appearance, it was also as widely varied as R. M. Schindler's jagged spaces, Anshen and Allen's urban high-rises, and John Lautner's flowing concrete caves.

Thomas Hines in Architecture of the Sun and Nicholas Olsberg in Living in a Modern Way do Lautner the ultimate honor of acknowledging that his work is as central to the idea of Southern California as that of Gill, Schindler and Neutra. The drama in this acknowledgment may not be readily apparent, but even after his death in 1994, Lautner remained an outsider. He had advocates (Esther McCoy among them), but most critics considered his work as startling, undisciplined, hedonistic, and as sprawling as Los Angeles itself. Above all, his varied, exploratory, and unconventional architecture confused critics (much as Schindler's confused Hitchcock). Thankfully he has emerged in the last decade as a quintessential California architect.

Olsberg and Hines properly highlight Lautner's Carling house, one of the most innovative and daring Southern Californian designs of the era — the conceptual equal of the Eames house.

While Hines covers a range of excellent architects in his book — J. R. Davidson, Gregory Ain, Harwell Hamilton Harris, Gordon Drake, Ray Kappe, and others — he devotes an entire chapter to Lautner. His overall assessment is mixed; while acknowledging "as a total environment...the Sheats-Goldstein residence would come to seem, over the years, one of Lautner's most impressive efforts," he finds flaws in Lautner's concepts and execution, averring that his lavish use of push buttons echoes the "conspicuous consumption" of the era. Lautner's unresolved details, he writes, compare unfavorably to Neutra's meticulous resolution. His houses exhibit "conceptually arbitrary and amorphously flabby qualities." The Levy house, "possesses a brooding monumentality, but never as movingly as in the work of Louis Kahn," another Modern master of concrete. "F...