John Lautner

John Edward Lautner (16 July 1911 – 24 October 1994) was an American architect. Following an apprenticeship in the mid 1930s with Frank Lloyd Wright, Lautner opened his own practice in 1938, where he would work for the remainder of his career. Lautner practiced primarily in California, and the majority of his works were residential. John 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 Sheets House, and Russ Garcia House.

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

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 idlyllic 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.

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