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| Iron Man's John Lautner-inspired house at Point Dume meets its doom |
From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
With Iron Man 3 hauling in $174 million at the box office last weekend, this is a good time to pay tribute to a great architect whose hold on the American imagination is finally getting the respect it deserves: John Lautner.
No matter where they’re filmed or when they’re set, the Iron Man movies take place, at least aesthetically and psychologically, in the shiny, optimistic, future-infatuated Southern California that peaked in the early 1960s.
Billionaire Tony Stark’s Iron Mansion in Malibu is a fictitious CGI homage to the sometimes hilarious—but often surprisingly lovely—science-fiction houses and coffee shops, gas stations, and motels that Lautner erected all over the Los Angeles area from the 1930s into the 1980s.
... Lautner, a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, was the finest exponent of the boyish fantasy school of design—Tom Swift books turned into cantilevered Googie drive-in restaurants—that is the indigenous style of the Southern California car-centered culture in which I grew up. Lautner’s school of commercial architecture required an unprecedentedly broad and affluent middle class, one perhaps never seen in world history before Los Angeles in the 1940s.
Read the whole thing there.
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