Sheats-Goldstein Residence

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Sheats-Goldstein Residence

The Sheats-Goldstein Residence is a residential building in Los Angeles ( Beverly Crest district ) built between 1961 and 1963 under the direction of the American architect John Lautner . The house is assigned to organic architecture and has been the location of several feature films.

history

The house was originally built by Lautner, who built the famous Chemosphere building in 1960, for Helen and Paul Sheats and their five children. Paul Sheats was a doctor, his wife Helen an artist. In 1948 Lautner had designed the Sheats Apartments for the couple , also in Los Angeles. He first constructed a topographical model of the steeply sloping property. A first draft of the later building was made by folding paper and arranging it on the topographical model. After a few changes of ownership, the house was acquired in 1972 by the US real estate mogul James Goldstein, who continuously commissioned Lautner to make changes to the house, which lasted until the architect's death in 1994. Since then, Goldstein has been working on further conversions with Lautner's former colleague Duncan Nicholson . He bought surrounding land, including the Concannon Residence, also designed by Lautner, which he had demolished in 2002 to make room for an additional Lautner-style building, which was completed in 2014. In 2016 Goldstein, then 76 years old, bequeathed the property with all the buildings on it to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art .

style

Club James (on-site nightclub)

The house fits like a cave into the sandstone of a hill in Benedict Canyon and offers a wide view of Los Angeles. The construction is dominated by concrete, steel, wood and glass. The ground floor is roughly hourglass-shaped with a narrow point at the entrance in the middle and sweeping wings on both sides. In the middle there is also the dining room , from which the house looks rather small, as the spatial expansion of the living space into the wings cannot be seen through a perspective trick. There are large ceiling windows above the kitchen and dining table, which can be opened electrically, giving the impression of eating outdoors. The living room, which occupies the east wing of the house, was originally open to the terrace and was only protected from outside influences by a kind of curtain made of compressed air. This blurred the line between “inside” and “outside”. The western wing contains guest bedrooms and bathrooms as well as other living rooms. Instead of air conditioning , the house is cooled by natural drafts. Both the floor of the apartment and the pool are heated by copper pipes. A partially covered staircase leads in a semicircle away from the ground floor down to the master bedroom, which is one floor below, but is in front of the rest of the house. Above this bedroom there is a pool connected to the ground floor by a terrace, which can be seen through windows from the bedroom. The terrace around the pool and the master bedroom have a typical Lautner design element: By dispensing with any delimitation of the pool terrace to the outside and through the continuous glazing of the bedroom towards the slope, the viewer creates the impression of space and of the blurring of the border between House and surroundings. Lautner used this concept in many of his houses, a number of which, like the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, stand on sloping properties. In this context, Lautner is considered to be the inventor of the infinity pool in modern architecture. While the west wing is covered by a flat roof, the dining area in the middle and the east wing with the living room are surmounted by a tent-like pitched roof that uses the topography of the site for its statics: on one side it rests on the surrounding rock.

Since James Goldstein bought the house in 1972, it has been continuously rebuilt. In the 1980s, the entrance area was expanded to include a koi pond, a waterfall and a paved path. Throughout the house, the stucco work on the ceiling was replaced with redwood and steel window struts with glass. In the kitchen, dining room and guest bathroom, the ceilings were redesigned so that they could be retracted electrically and thus opened up a clear view of the sky. One of the first induction hobs available was installed in the kitchen. In the living room, a wall made of sliding glass panes was installed facing the terrace.

The additional building above the house is stylistically based on Lautner's ideas and includes offices, a library, a night club and a tennis court on the roof on three floors. After Goldstein's acquisitions, the entire property has a size of 16,000 square meters and employs four full-time gardeners.

Above horizon

Above Horizon is an art installation in the form of a small one-room building on a slope below the house. The building was designed by James Turrell in collaboration with Duncan Nicholson and is part of Turrell's work cycle of Skyspace installations. It is made of the same material as the house. In the late 1980s, James Goldstein had conceived the installation as a collaboration between John Lautner and James Turrell, but Lautner died before he could devote himself more intensively to the project. The installation was completed in 2005. In the ceiling and in a corner there are two panels made of carbon fiber composite material designed by aerospace engineer Dave Ronnenberg (designer of the lightweight aircraft Berkut 360 ), which open at certain times (or manually controlled). In the middle of the room is a permanently installed four-person sofa made of concrete (with a leather cover), from which one can see thousands of LEDs that illuminate the room in different colors every evening.

reception

The house was the location of several films, for example for Charlie's Angels - Full Throttle , Bandits! and The Big Lebowski . Several music videos were also shot in it, such as Let's Get Blown by Snoop Dogg . The house was also the location of the 1996 porn film Unleashed by director Andrew Blake . The Sheats-Goldstein Residence was often used for fashion photography , for example Herb Ritts , Helmut Newton and Michel Comte shot photo series in the house.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nicholas Olsberg (ed.): Between Earth and Heaven. The Architecture of John Lautner . Rizzoli International Publications, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-8478-3014-5 , pp. 101 .
  2. ↑ a b Wallpaper.com: The big gift: John Lautner's Sheats Goldstein house comfortably to LACMA. Retrieved May 21, 2018 .
  3. ^ Telegraph.co.uk: The top houses from the movies. Retrieved May 21, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange: John Lautner . Taschen, Cologne 2005, ISBN 978-3-8228-3962-1 , pp. 85 .
  5. ↑ TheOutline.com: Infinity jest: How the infinity pool wurde a social media status symbol. Retrieved May 21, 2018 .
  6. ↑ Curbed.com: Inside the Coolest Private Club in LA as it Nears Completion. Retrieved May 21, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Curbed.com: Sheats-Goldstein House's Bananas New Entertainment Complex Will Have the Best Views of LA. Retrieved May 21, 2018 .
  8. ↑ CaliforniaHomeDesign.com: Shedding Light On LA Artist James Turrell's Skyspace Installations. Retrieved May 21, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Curbed.com: The Actual Porn Made at Jackie Treehorn's Spectacular House. Retrieved May 21, 2018 .

Coordinates: 34 ° 5 ′ 36.1 ″  N , 118 ° 26 ′ 3.7 ″  W.