Silver top
Silvertop , also known as Reiner Residence or Reiner-Burchill Residence , is a residential building built by John Lautner in Los Angeles , USA, from 1956 to 1963 .
location
Silvertop is located in the Moreno Highlands in the Silver Lake neighborhood on the west bank of the Silver Lake Reservoir, which it overlooks from a cliff. Lautner's own home at the time, Lautner House , is only 200 m southwest of Silvertop. Opposite, on the other side of the lake, is the 30 years older, also experimental Neutra VDL Studio and Residences by Richard Neutra .
history
The building was commissioned by Kenneth Reiner (* 1916, † 2011), who had made his fortune as an engineer in the 1940s and 1950s through two patents. Although Reiner wanted a house for himself and his family, it was intended to serve research purposes insofar as he explicitly wanted the use of new materials and technologies. He was closely involved in the design of the house and developed technical devices by hand in his factory that he and Lautner had intended for the house, but which were not (yet) available on the market. Reiner himself never got around to living in the house because he ran into financial difficulties and had to sell the almost finished house - construction costs had risen from an originally estimated USD 75,000 to almost USD 1,000,000, and Reiner was in a business at the time Embroiled in an argument and had an expensive divorce to finance. A new owner was only found in 1974 in the internist Philip Stephen Burchill, who had Lautner make further structural changes; it was first occupied in 1976. In 1987, scenes from the film Unter Null were shot in the house. Burchill passed away in 2012 and his widow sold the house for US $ 7,500,000 to Luke Wood, COO of Beats Electronics .
style
Silvertop marks a turning point in Lautner's career. In Los Angeles in the immediate post-war period, which was enormously enlarged by war returnees and their families and therefore required a lot of living space, Lautner, who had just started his own business, built numerous residential and commercial properties, which earned him recognition for his courageous style, as he said Architectural critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock Lautner's self-constructed house was called "the best house in the United States that an architect under 30 has built". With Silvertop, Lautner went a significant step further in his artistic radicalization, it is the first house for which he worked with concrete as a style-defining, i.e. extensively used and form-giving material. Using poured concrete, he was able to overcome the principle of right angles in conventional house construction and create any flowing lines and surfaces. The name "Silvertop" is derived from the roof of the south wing, which is made entirely of concrete and looks like a gently curved hill. A narrow, winding, about 100 meter long driveway leads up the slope to the house entrance, whereby the end of a 180 ° bend encircles the northeast wing of the house and a guest house underneath and acts as a cantilever bridge not supported by pillars or other structures acts, a construction developed by civil engineer Eugene Birnbaum. At this entrance, Lautner's endeavors, as with other houses built by him during this period, not to overcome the geographical nature of the building site, but to dovetail it with the building. Since the individually cast concrete slabs that form the entrance are only about ten centimeters thick, special statics tests were ordered by the building authorities. The house has roughly the shape of a three-bladed propeller with a leafy atrium as a "hub" in the middle, the southern wing being shaped like a ship's hull and ending in a point towards the south. This south wing, which includes the living room, is visually dominated by a curved flat roof made of concrete overhanging a good two meters, from which curved panels made of glass also hang down, forming the (non-load-bearing) outer walls. The glass panels can be rotated around their axes like slats so that the sides of the living room wing can be opened completely and, a typical Lautner motif, the line between inside and outside is blurred. The curve that forms the flat roof is a design element that also manifests itself in the driveway and the round floor plan of the guest house.
The special features of the facility included sinks without taps that automatically filled with water, and a hydraulically controllable dining table that could be raised for meals and lowered for cocktail parties. The pool is one of the first infinity pools in today's sense; the stone border ends at the level of the water surface and offers the viewer the optical illusion of a seamless transition into the Silver Lake in the valley.
The house has 700 m² of living space, which includes three bedrooms and four bathrooms. The guest house includes a darkroom that the amateur photographer Burchill had built in. A tennis court belongs to the property.
The contemporary press found the house to be extremely futuristic. The Saturday Evening Post evaluated that the house looked like it would "hiss off to Mars at any time", the headline of the article was "Dream house or nightmare?"
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Los Angeles Times, September 23, 2011, available online
- ^ Nicholas Olsberg: Between Earth and Heaven. The Architecture of John Lautner, p. 91. Rizzoli Int. Publications 2011.
- ↑ a b Article in a private blog. Retrieved June 8, 2015 .
- ↑ Article on LA Curbed (2011). Retrieved June 9, 2015 .
- ^ Obituary for Philip Stephen Burchill. Retrieved June 8, 2015 .
- ↑ Article on LA Curbed (2014). Retrieved June 8, 2015 .
- ↑ Daily Mail of August 13, 2014, available online
- ^ John Lautner interviewed by Marlene L. Laskey, p. 140. Oral History Program, University of California 1986.
- ^ Nicholas Olsberg: Between Earth and Heaven. The Architecture of John Lautner, p. 87.
- ^ Object page of the LA Conservancy. Retrieved May 31, 2015 .
- ↑ Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange: John Lautner, p. 59. Taschen 2005.
- ↑ Article on LA Observed. Retrieved June 12, 2015 .
Coordinates: 34 ° 5 ′ 56.4 ″ N , 118 ° 16 ′ 9 ″ W.