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Body Double, Less Than Zero, Diamonds Are Forever: You may have never heard of architect John Lautner (1911-1994), but you have seen his work. Lautner’s mid- to late-20th-century Southern California houses appear so frequently in film that architectural historian Alan Hess once dubbed him the "most famous unknown architect in America." Indeed, his buildings have been seen by millions of moviegoers, but Lautner’s reputation still languishes in the shadow of his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he apprenticed at Taliesin from 1933 to 1939. And although he is sometimes footnoted with Bruce Goff as a minor contributor to the Organic Expressionism of Wright and Louis Sullivan, and occasionally mentioned for his work’s similarities to the Structural Expressionism of contemporaries such as Oscar Niemeyer and Eero Saarinen, Lautner and his unique contribution often escape notice. It is not by chance that his projects appear so consistently in the cinema. In fact, Lautner’s architecture has stronger affinities with film than the work of almost any other architect. With their dramatic curvilinear forms and large spans of glass, his houses create spectacular screen images of reflection, transparency, and fragmentation. But more important, his structures also operate like motion picture cameras to construct "wide-screen" views; indeed, many Lautner houses in the Hollywood Hills — like the futuristic and immediately familiar Malin House (commonly known as the Chemosphere, 1960) — are famous for framing wide-angle vistas of Los Angeles.

Cinematographers in particular have long recognized Lautner’s cinematic potential. After filming sequences at the Arango House (1973) in Acapulco for Bette Cohen’s 1990 Lautner documentary, the director of photography Dan Kneece insisted, "There wasn’t a bad angle in the whole place." He also exposed Lautner’s wide-screen aspirations: "Everything he did — it was like Panavision!" Edward Lachman, the director of photography for Less Than Zero (1987), which used Lautner’s Reiner House (also known as Silvertop, 1963) as its primary location, shares Lautner’s penchant for wide frames. Despite their inherent compositional difficulties, Lachman favors wide aspect ratios because broad frames give viewers freedom to choose their focus. To that end, at least six films that use Lautner’s houses as locations were shot in the extra-wide aspect ratio of 2.35:1 instead of the standard US wide-screen format of 1.85:1.

But if Lautner’s fame can be attributed partly to Hollywood, then the architect’s relative anonymity can be blamed on the architectural press. Although his architecture was a consistent favorite with popular magazines such as House and Garden and Playboy, professional architecture periodicals practically ignored Lautner’s work during his design prime in the 1960s and ’70s. And when critics and theorists did discuss Lautner’s buildings, they often characterized them as the worst form of kitsch — guilty pleasures catering to the hedonistic desires of the nouveau riche. His projects have been termed "wasteful" by both the popular interiors magazine Architectural Digest and the respected architecture critic and curator Aaron Betsky, who went so far as to describe Lautner’s oeuvre as the "bravura gesture of a wasteful genius."

While many of his projects were designed for the expensive hillside sites of wealthy clients, this fact alone does not sufficiently explain why Lautner’s work has been singled out as excessive. Many other architects, including Richard Neutra and Pierre Koenig, have designed equally ocularcentric houses in the Hollywood Hills. Why are Lautner’s projects so often disparaged as excessive while Neutra’s and Koenig’s steel and glass designs for Arts & Architecture magazine’s midcentury Case Study House program are not? One answer might be that in an architectural culture dominated by Cartesian space, Lautner’s enveloping views literally fail to fit the grid. Vision that is naturalized, or seemingly democratized, by the Cartesian grid is safely contained. But vision "unleashed" by Lautner’s wide panoramic frames assumes connotations of danger and excess.