Desert Hot Springs Motel

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The Desert Hot Springs Motel (originally Bubbling Wells Resort , today The Lautner Hotel ) is an ensemble of buildings originally designed and built by John Lautner as a motel in Desert Hot Springs in the US state of California . It is assigned to organic architecture and, after numerous conversions and renovations, is now operated as a boutique hotel .

location

The Desert Hot Springs Motel is located in the middle of the 25,000-inhabitant town of Desert Hot Springs in Riverside County , 150 km east of Los Angeles . The place, which was only founded in 1941, is known for its thermal springs and lies on the northern edge of the Coachella Valley .

history

The system was commissioned by the film producer Lucien Hubbard in 1947 . He originally had a small planned town with a good 100 buildings in mind as a refuge for film stars from nearby Los Angeles and acquired a plot of 240 hectares for this purpose. Lautner first built a motel under the name Bubbling Wells Resort, which included four residential units and a communal swimming pool. The residential units were scalable; An expansion by further, identical units up to the desired size of the overall project was considered. The project was discontinued and the entire facility lay idle for over 20 years, while the motel, now known as Desert Hot Springs Motel, was used by Hubbard and his entourage as a refuge. After Hubbard's death in 1971, the property was divided and sold. The buyer of the motel had the pool demolished and the property fallow and in 1981 sold it to an interior designer who converted the four residential units into apartments. In 2000 he sold the property to Steve Lowe, an assistant to William S. Burroughs , who ran the Desert Hot Springs Beat Hotel, which was already dedicated to Burroughs. Lowe restored the complex according to Lautner's designs, furnished it with furniture from the late 1940s and early 1950s, and ran the complex again as a motel. After Lowe's death in 2007, an interior designer and furniture designer from Los Angeles bought the property, which was originally valued at over one million US dollars, for 425,000 US dollars, renovated it for four years and opened it as a boutique hotel in 2011 with the approval of the Lautner Foundation "The Lautner" with four individually designed rooms new.

The Desert Hot Springs Motel is the only hotel Lautner ever built and the only one of his works that is open to the public.

style

Front view of the residential units (2006)

Despite the focus on aesthetics, the facility was designed to last in the hostile environment of a desert; it had to withstand the sun, sandstorms, sudden floods of rain and earthquakes. The walls and roofs of the immediately adjacent 55 m² residential units are made of shotcrete , an unusual building material in the late 1940s that was otherwise only used in the construction of swimming pools. The other building materials that are visible are steel, wood of the coastal sequoia and glass. In an interview in 1982 Lautner explained that the average motel in the 1940s, due to its lightweight construction, tended to "rattle and scream" under the influence of wind and that he therefore intuitively opted for concrete and steel as the load-bearing materials. The red steel beams protrude into the rooms. The residential units have an identical basic construction. The outer shape of a residential unit is asymmetrical, the load-bearing walls are higher on one side than on the other, so the respective roof is sloping. From the outside, this results in a jagged contour for the facility, which is intended to be reminiscent of the craggy cliffs of the Little San Bernadino Mountains immediately north of Desert Hot Springs. The residential units themselves are very winding one-room apartments with a trapezoidal floor plan, an open kitchen and bathroom. The fully glazed exterior fronts, ceiling lights and the partially open roof structure make the apartments appear larger than they are. The residents are protected from desert winds and the sun by head-high walls and the overhanging roof, and they also create privacy, which was a key concept of value for builder Hubbard and his media-focused clique in Los Angeles in the 1940s. Lautner biographer Nicholas Olsberg sees clear influences from the Taliesin West house of Frank Lloyd Wright , whose student Lautner was and on whose Taliesin project he was involved. The US lifestyle magazine Palm Springs Life assessed that the complex had "the aesthetic appeal of an army bunker despite the sophisticated interior (...)." According to the architecture photographer Julius Shulman , who is a friend of Lautner , the locals initially thought the facility was a secret government project.

The interior is in the modernist style of Lautner from the 1950s. The individual apartments are designed differently. The furniture is u. a. by contemporary furniture designer Harry Bertoia . One of the rooms is dedicated to the furniture designer Charles Hollis Jones , whose heyday was in the 1960s and 1970s. A jointly usable, walled-in area behind the residential units contains u. a. a small pool and barbecue.

The original pool formed an irregular polygon made up of two separate pools and was partially roofed over with a steel structure. Glass walls protected him from the desert wind.

reception

In 2007 the Austrian director Sasha Pirker made a short film about the hotel, which was shown at the Viennale 2011.

Web links

Commons : Desert Hot Springs Motel  - Collection of pictures, videos, and audio files

Coordinates: 33 ° 56 ′ 18.6 "  N , 116 ° 28 ′ 49.8"  W.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ TheLautner.com: History. Retrieved October 31, 2017 .
  2. ^ Nicholas Olsberg: Between Earth and Heaven. The Architecture of John Lautner . Rizzoli International Publications, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-8478-3014-5 , pp. 84 .
  3. ^ Modernist Architecture (private weblog): Palm Springs Photo Festival. Retrieved October 31, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Curbed.com: Desert Hot Springs Lautner Sale Complete. Retrieved October 31, 2017 .
  5. ↑ a b PalmSpringsLife.com: Déjà New. Retrieved October 31, 2017 .
  6. ↑ PalmSpringsLife.com: Winning Retreats. Retrieved October 31, 2017 .
  7. ↑ Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange: John Lautner . Taschen, Cologne 2005, ISBN 978-3-8228-3962-1 , pp. 31 ff .
  8. ^ Nicholas Olsberg: Between Earth and Heaven. The Architecture of John Lautner . Rizzoli International Publications, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-8478-3014-5 , pp. 30 .
  9. ↑ TracyBeckmann.com: Hotel Lautner. Retrieved October 31, 2017 .
  10. ^ NYTimes.com: Transparent Furniture for Rooms of Light. Retrieved October 31, 2017 .
  11. ↑ SixpackFilm.com: John Lautner, The Desert Hot Springs Motel. Retrieved October 31, 2017 .