John Lautner's forgotten masterpiece! The Ernest Lautner House in Florida. Overview & walkthrough

[Music] hello my dear audience in this episode we travel all the way to Florida to the City of Pensacola and we're going to visit one of the least known designs by John lner in the center of the city is a bayou that streams towards the ocean and next to this river is a very unique house with its circular roof it's easily recognizable for from a high altitude next to the house is a kusak and from there we walk over the driveway seen from here the house appears to be very enclosed with a low hanging roof and only one floor level but once we walk towards the garden the house turns out to be much larger with moldable floor levels and from the rear it's very transparent the large roof looks very thin and light in weight and it appears to be floating on a series of wooden window frames when we look from above we see that the structure is perfectly circular in the middle of the circle is a skylight when we remove the roof we see a structure of wooden beams these beams are supported by a very thick concrete pillar which is 14 ft high and fed deep in the ground a crown like construction of four steel arms is placed on top of the pillar these four arms are holding a steel ring and the plexus Dome of the Skylight is placed within this ring while 67 wooden beams are resting on a rim at the UND side of the Ring each beam is hold in place with one steel bolt screwed in a rim at the other side the beams are supported by Thin wooden pillars these pillars are resting on concrete footings in the ground and a floor made of CED concrete for further support curving arms were placed between the beams horizontally connecting the beams with each other the unders side of the arms was painted bright blue this makes the house one of the very few occasions where John lner used bright colors in his designs and the blue arms together form a perfect blue circle all the beams have been miter saw at a 30° angle this makes them very thin at the end while they are actually quite thick creating a thin roof Edge making the house more transparent and giving the roof its lightweight appearance the great benefit of the entire construction is that the walls are derived from any loadbearing function so in many parts they don't go up to the roof allowing large Windows finally the roof was made of wooden roof plates that were placed over the construction and when we remove that roof we can see that the floor plan doesn't have the same shape as a circular roof the floor plan consists of multiple different shapes that point in various directions not every space Under The Roof is internal and many covered places are open to the outside space this creates many porch likee Parts under the roof providing a lot of Shadow and cooling without the need for air conditioning also interesting is that the floor plan consists of multiple elevations namely the house is built against the Hillside and as usual with Organic architecture the landscape is not allowed to be changed therefore the elevations in the hillside create multiple floor levels the highest floor level is the cardboard the front door and the bedroom [Music] Wing right from the front door is a stair and if you walk down this stair you arrive at the middle floor level this is where the living room and kitchen are from the living room is a second stair and there's a sloping ramp from the stair and the ramp you can walk towards the porch and The Boat House placed on the lowest floor level the red lines indicate the concrete footing on which the walls and pillars are placed when we remove those lines from the drawing we see that the space of the lowest floor level is limited by the increasing ground of the hillside let's now walk through the house we start at a [Music] carboard because the roof of the carboard has to cover a large distance it is further supported by a steel beam which forms a quarter of a circle the beam is resting on a two brick walls on both sides of the cardboard for extra support a pillar with a brick wall is placed under the beam we step through the front door and we look directly at the large Central column with amazing roof construction left from the front door are two bedrooms with adjacent bathrooms these bedrooms have a series of smaller windows that look out over the garden there's an internal balcony placed over the kitchen and a pantry from where you can walk towards the concrete column and look out over the living [Music] room now we go down over the stair into the living space behind this door is a stair that leads downwards into the boat boat house next to the stair is a shutter and behind it is a window that looks into the carport on a higher ground [Music] level here you see the same shutter and window and the door and here is the internal balcony underneath is an open kitchen with a large half circular counter we go to the other side of the same living space this is the sitting area which is centered around a cone-shaped masonry fireplace the firewood is stored at the left in a closet with a hidden door placed in a point of the triangle the firewood is brought in through a hatch in the carport behind the chimney is a storage unit with a door at the right side of the fireplace one of the greatest qualities of this house is the amazing use of masonry the cone shaped chimney was already an example of brilliant craftsmanship but even more brilliant is the curving wall here you see the same part of the wall but then from the outside this wall starts at the cboard where it follows the lines of the roof like the roof the wall is laid down down in a circle but this circle is only half the size the rest of the circle partly continues at the bedrooms in the higher floor level because the circle is smaller than the lines of the roof the wall curves inside like a spiral the wall is placed Over The Descent of the hillside while it always remains at the same height this means that the wall goes down in a diagonal line L over the Hillside and is sinking below the horizontal middle floor level below the floor the circle continues where it enters the lower floor level and goes outside into the porch finally the wall ends at the end of the hillside next to the sloping ramp building this wall is difficult for three reasons first curving masonry is extremely hard to do but second the the wall leans backwards which is even more challenging and three the bricks are placed in a line after each other creating perfect diagonal lines that follow the slopes of the Hillside and create strong perspectives there is a second curving wall which is part of a circle with a smaller diameter the kitchen is placed against the inside of the curve the wall doesn't follow the Descent of the hill so at the start of the sloped ramp the wall is at the same height as the kitchen counter while at the end of the ramp the wall is several feet above the lower floor level a small but funny detail is the planter placed in a circular brick wall around the concrete column forming the final Circle in the floor plan we step outside through the back door and walk over the ramp between the two curving walls and we enter the [Music] porch the porch is enclosed from the garden by a mosquito fence which is very useful in a humid and swamp-like environment in this part of Florida interestingly enough a necessary protective measure like a mosquito fence becomes the perfect embod of John lner's Vision on architecture namely the screened porch is a space where outside and inside are blending together which is the most important trademark of organic architecture the higher placed bedroom has Windows that look out into the [Music] porch through this door you can leave the porch and climb up the Hillside and walk around the house this door gives access to the boat house behind this door is the stair that leads to the living room there is a storage closet placed in a hollow space under the stair that connects the living room with the higher bedroom Wing the boat house has a lower pit where you can place a boat and through the rolling shutters The Boat House opens towards a slipway from there you can push your boat into the water of the river at the end of the garden is a wooden Jetty that leads to a circular platform from here you can look out of the Bayou a final important trivial fact was that John lner designed this house for his cousin Ernest lner and this time John lner only made the drawings and he was never PR during the construction process he saw the house only once in 1991 32 years after the completion almost every client by lner lived around Los Angeles but erns lner lived in Florida and this makes the house only one of the four designs that are located outside California the other three designs being the harpel house in Anchorage Alaska the Turner house in Aspen [Music] Colorado and third the orango house in aapo Mexico which is the only one placed outside the United States during the daytime the house is already amazing but at night it is even more beautiful when the fireplace is lit the Flames are reflected each time in one of the 18 glass plates of the curving window creating 18 reflections of the same fire the illumination makes the house fully transparent showing its many curving walls and circles I think it's a shame that such a brilliant design is so little known until a few weeks ago I had never heard of the existence of this masterpiece therefore I made this video because I believe that like many other designs by John lner this house deserves more [Music] attention

Channel: John Lautner Architecture Videos

Views: 32,691

Keywords: florida, pensacola, ernestlautnerhouse, john lautner, frank lloyd wright, richard neutra, mid century modernism, american architecture, interior design, organic architecture, florida architecture, space age, googie, construction, modernist architecture, round house, masterpiece, luxury house

Id: 8XrSehIesII

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2024