Following an apprenticeship in the mid-1930s with the Taliesin Fellowship led by Frank Lloyd Wright, Lautner opened his own practice in 1938, where he worked for the remainder of his career.

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.

[2] A crucial early influence in Lautner's life was the construction of the family's idyllic summer cabin, "Midgaard", sited on a rock shelf on a remote headland on the shore on Lake Superior.

In April 1933, after reading the autobiography of Frank Lloyd Wright, Vida Lautner approached the architect, who had recently launched his apprenticeship program at Taliesin.

Lautner's first independent project was a low-cost $2500 one-bedroom frame house for the Springer family, built with his contractor friend Paul Speer, but this was to be the only product of their brief collaboration.

[11] In September 1938, Wright contacted him and this led to Lautner's supervision of a series of Los Angeles domestic projects, the Sturges, Green, Lowe, Bell, and Mauer houses.

His early work was on a relatively modest scale but in later years, as his reputation grew and his client base became more affluent, his design projects became increasingly grand, culminating in the palatial 25,000 sq ft (2,300 m2) Arango residence in Acapulco, Mexico.

What most people do is an assembly of cliches or facades or what-have-you ...[25]Throughout his life Lautner was a passionate admirer of his mentor (to whom he typically referred as "Mr. Wright") and he remained a dedicated practitioner of organic architecture.

I mean, I am one of two or three that may have done it, you know ...[27]Although his earlier works not surprisingly displayed some of the influence of his mentor,[28] Lautner gradually developed his own style and consciously avoided anything that could be classified as "Wright-influenced".

[36][37][38] One of Lautner's most significant early works, this house embodies many of his central design concerns and includes key features that he would continue to explore and develop throughout his career.

As de La Vaux recounted in the 2009 Lautner documentary, the project was briefly halted by a rare snowstorm that dumped more than six inches of snow on the Hollywood area.

[39] Lautner's design incorporates many innovative features: He used external steel cantilever beams to support the roof of the hexagonal main living area, creating a completely open space, free of any internal columns.

The Carling House has become one of Lautner's most celebrated designs and marked the beginning of his fruitful collaboration with de la Vaux, which lasted through seven major projects, including the famous "Chemosphere".

It was distinctive for its expansive glass walls, arresting angular form, prominent roofline, and exuberant signage oriented to car traffic: an advertisement for itself.

Another key Lautner work in the Googie genre was Henry's Restaurant (1957) in Pomona; its vaulted roof, resembling an inverted boat hull, arched over the interior booths and the large exposed beams (made from glue-laminated timber) carried through to the exterior, where they supported a slatted awning that shaded the drive-in area.

Other architects spread the Modern aesthetic of the coffee shop/drive-in in such as Tiny Naylor's (Lautner employer Douglas Honnold), Ship's (Martin Stern, Jr.), and Norm's and Clock's (Armet and Davis.)

The style was denigrated by East Coast critics and Lautner's reputation suffered; as a result he became wary of talking to the press[42] and it is notable that his 1986 UCLA oral history interviews include no references at all to these early projects.

Located at 776 Torreyson Drive, Los Angeles, the house was designed for young aerospace engineer Leonard Malin in 1960 and built by John de la Vaux.

[17] The steep hillside site had been given to Malin by his father-in-law, but was considered impossible to build on until Lautner devised his design: The typical way to approach it would have been to bulldoze out a lot and put in 30-foot-high retaining walls to try to hold up the mountain, which is just insane.

Since there are effectively no solid external walls – the entire outer "face" of the house is eight large picture windows – the Chemosphere enjoys a panoramic view over the San Fernando Valley.

The massive, radiating glued laminated timber roof bearers and crossbeams, which echo the keel and ribs of a ship hull, were built by de la Vaux using the same type of mortise joints he had used in his boat building.

German publisher Benedikt Taschen purchased the house in 2000 and restored it in collaboration with architects Frank Escher and Ravi Gunewardena, earning them an award from the Los Angeles Conservancy.

A commission by industrialist Kenneth Reiner,[47] the 4,721 square feet[48] Reiner-Burchill Residence, "Silvertop" (1956–76), was his first major exploration of the sculptural possibilities of monolithic concrete as it was designed to follow the exact contour of its hilltop site.

[49] The project had a long and difficult gestation – while it was still being built, original owner Kenneth Reiner (with whom Lautner collaborated closely) was bankrupted by the fraudulent dealings of his business partners and was forced to sell the house.

Lautner also faced opposition from the Los Angeles building certification authorities, who were dismayed by the radical design of the post-stressed concrete ramp, which cantilevers out from the base of the house without any columns supporting it from beneath, and is only four inches thick.

Originally slated to have an entirely concrete roof, the City of Los Angeles was too unfamiliar with Lautner's far-out designs and would not issue a construction permit for anything other than wood glulam beams.

The two architecture aficionados embarked on an extensive restoration of the iconic structure, hiring renovation specialists Marmol Radziner for the design/build, Darren Brown for the interiors and Marcello Villano on landscape.

After building the first four-unit prototype and pool, the project came to a halt and was subsequently used for Hubbard's stars and starlets as a getaway from Los Angeles; it gradually fell into disuse and sat vacant for almost 20 years.

In 2014, Santa Rosa-based Oakmont Senior Living offered to acquire the Winnetka Avenue site and to replace the Lautner building with a two-story, 84,978-square-foot facility better suited for eldercare.

[66] In 2007 the Foundation donated its archive of drawings, models, photographs, and other materials that belonged to John Lautner to the Getty Research Institute Special Collections.