John Lautner
These days, we do most of our work in the hills in and around Newport Beach, Calif. To describe the area as "affluent" is understating the case: For years now, even modest homes for sale in the area usually draw seven-figure prices - and the more modest the home, the likelier it is that it will be torn down and replaced with something larger and more elaborate. Through the past few years, we at Pure Water Pools of Costa Mesa, Calif., have been called to many of these built-out properties by homeowners who
This edition of WaterShapes EXTRA brings back some particularly warm memories for me - and a great sense of pride. [ ] For starters, there's the Essential item about John Lautner by his close associate, Helena Arahuete. "Organic Artistry" (click here) was thekind of feature we only dreamed about running when
The late, great architect John Lautner is believed to have been among the first to conceive of and build a vanishing-edge swimming pool as a means of more directly tying views across the water into distant vistas. It's a landmark of modern aquatic design that has been emulated thousands of times in the 45 years since he designed "Silvertop" in Los Angeles, and it's wonderful to know that his spirit of innovation survives to this day in the company he started. The home and watershapes seen here are the work of Lautner's protégé and longtime collaborator, Helena Arahuete of John Lautner Associates (Hollywood, Calif.), who composed it all as a spectacular exploration of organic design principles and the use of water to express and magnify details of a setting while leading the
The late, great architect John Lautner is believed to have been among the first to conceive of and build a vanishing-edge swimming pool as a means of more directly tying views across the water into distant vistas. It's a landmark of modern aquatic design that has been emulated thousands of times in the 45 years since he designed "Silvertop" in Los Angeles, and it's wonderful to know that his spirit of innovation survives to this day in the company he started. The home and watershapes seen here are the work of Lautner's protégé and longtime collaborator, Helena Arahuete of John Lautner Associates (Hollywood, Calif.), who composed it all as a spectacular exploration of organic design principles and the use of water to express and magnify details of a setting while leading the
Helena Arahuete joined the staff of John Lautner's architectural firm in the early 1960s, at a point where he was turning out some of his most spectacular work. Indeed, Lautner can indisputably be said to have designed some of the most beautiful and unusual homes built in the second half of the 20th Century. An apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright's who studied with the master at Taliesen, Lautner was an exponent of the philosophy and discipline known as "Organic Architecture," an approach Arahuete, now an eminent architect in her own right, has continued to use and refine while running the firm that still bears Lautner's name. She is now one of the world's leading practitioners of Wright's and Lautner's approach to creating unique structures that are intricately and intimately tied to their surroundings. She is also so firm a proponent of the integration of watershapes into those architectural forms that in April 2000, she carried her message to the first Genesis 3 Level II Design School, held in Islamorada, Fla. - and welcomed an opportunity to present some of Lautner's work here by way of defining the place watershapers have at the design table with
