John Lautner

John Edward Lautner (16 July 1911 – 24 October 1994) was an influential American architect whose work in Southern California combined progressive engineering with humane design and dramatic space-age flair. 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...