Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner

The Lighthouse, Scotland's National Architecture and Design Centre, is to stage the only European showing of Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner, as part of its 10th anniversary season.

The exhibition, devised by the Hammer Museum, LA and curated by Nicholas Olsberg and Frank Escher, draws on the substantial Lautner archive held by The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

It features rarely seen original drawings and plans, six models and seven specially commissioned videos of Lautner houses by British film maker, Murray Grigor.

The exhibition, which spreads over two galleries, runs from 20 March - 26 July 2009.

A series of events, including special screenings of Murray Grigor's 90-minute documentary on the life and work of John Lautner, will complement the exhibition.

John Lautner's work is about the power of architecture to awake the senses -- how space can be shaped to excite awareness of light, movement, and vista within a building and evoke a feeling for the landscape, distances, and horizons beyond it.

To do that, Lautner pioneered, long before their time, fluid and plastic approaches to built form that stretched structure and materials to their limits.

Though his last major works were designed in the early 1980s, and his innovations go back to 1946, they continue to startle with the freedom and variety of their forms and plans, their structural originality and their sculptural force.

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