Superior Architecture!

Say you were a Los Angeles homeowner who recently availed yourself of an existing John Lautner in need of repair, or maybe a flush Angeleno with a stratospheric plot of land that you think cries out for a Lautner-esque touch and, after some cursory googling, you learn that the man has been dead for thirty years. Depending on the configuration of your search terms, Google might turn up nothing about the architecture office that continues to fly the Lautner flag, but if it does turn up something, you will notice another name in the results field—that of Helena Arahuete. From there, it won’t take much to realize that Arahuete, a Belgian who was raised and educated in Argentina before moving to LA in 1971, is not only John Lautner’s former right-hand architect, but as much his heir and successor as anyone ever could be.

Here is where I confess that I—a historian and writer about architecture, not the owner of a Lautner and not flush—never heard of Arahuete until I met the curator Silvia Perea at an opening of my friend Robin Donaldson’s work at the Santa Barbara gallery Sullivan Goss and arranged to go see a fantastically comprehensive exhibition about her work nearby at UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum. From Within coincided with the museum’s sixtieth anniversary, and Perea very much wanted to use the opportunity to highlight an undercelebrated female architect. There are of course many well-intentioned attempts to bring various female architects back into (or introduce for the first time to) public consciousness, and the show felt at once like a phenomenal example of the form and a reminder of how far we still have to go.

The exhibition was designed like spokes on a bicycle wheel, with eight sections fanning out from a central open space, a gathering and orienting area that Perea connected to Arahuete’s work itself. On entry, one encountered a large-scale portrait of Arahuete, shown clasping her hands with a wedding ring prominently displayed, that introduced the viewer to the vibrancy of this still-living, still-working, yet somehow still-only-historical figure. A nearby installation contextualized Lautner and his “organic” approach to architecture, which Arahuete eventually made her own. Not far away, a greeting card scrawled with almost indecipherable handwriting read, “Dear Helena, Another year and your work more important than ever (with my infirmity). Thank you—the backbone of our office—Superior Architecture! — John, 1993.”

Lautner sent Arahuete a number of cards, presumably one for each holiday they shared, and as his handwriting slips along with his health, the tone becomes ever more personal and loving, appreciative of all she contributed to the office and also his life. As someone interested in the collaborations between people, I threw a keen eye toward understanding, as best I could, exactly how Arahuete and Lautner worked together—and how the former succeeded the latter as lead designer even as she remained loyal to the name and legacy. You could see that in the signature blocks of the large-format drawings featured in the show. As late as 1993, renderings bore his sole signature; in subsequent projects, however, the signature gave way to “Lautner Associates,” stamped, with “Helena Arahuete, Architect” handwritten on an underlayer, or “Lautner” handwritten and “Associates” not handwritten, with “Helena Arahuete” printed below. After Lautner’s death, the office redesigned its stamp, which positions “Lautner Associates” just above “Helena Arahuete Architect.”

As for the drawings themselves, I was entranced by their sophistication, which demonstrated how extraordinary an architectural imagination Arahuete’s is. House Above the Morning Clouds, finished in 2009 in Green Valley, California, pinwheels the program around a central open skylight as massive expanses of glass draw wide vistas of the exterior into the sheltered home; the Sher House, a residence in Hawaii, is like a gently curved potato chip resting on the surface of the earth. But it’s more than just cool shapes, and the exhibition’s celebration of Arahuete’s draftsmanship reiterates the incredible technical facility and breadth of knowledge required to be a good architect. A note in red pen she appended to a site plan read, “Verify if too close to olives,” while a colored floor plan from 1996 looked almost like the surface of a board game, each living space articulated in a blocky, blackened visual style that contrasted with the blue of a small creek nearby.

It was all a reminder of how much creativity there can be in architecture, something that—of course, this is an eternal complaint—seems to get lost the more we move into unprecedented times of political strife and climate collapse and economic inequality and everything else that accompanies the hellish realities of late-stage capitalism and the fact that so much architecture now seems to be built solely as a means of moving money from one place to another. Arahuete’s work is playful and lively and energetic and above all fun; it’s clear she had a select number of clients, and they trusted her and wanted the kinds of houses that no one else could have ever imagined, let alone seen their way to building. And that’s part of the joy of a show like this, especially for viewers who have been looking at and thinking about images of buildings for years—twenty in my case—without a break. These images, even though they are old, feel new. These images, even though they are in many ways highly technical, feel playful. These images, even though they aren’t all the foundations of a built project, feel realistic.

My one Annoying Comment about From Within is that while it was profoundly informative, it didn’t feel as though it quite advanced either an Arahuetean or a feminist agenda, and I found myself wondering what the stakes of the exhibit were and how to place this work in a larger historical, practical, and conceptual context. I was drawn to the formal execution of both her work and the exhibit, and yet I kept asking myself why Arahuete, why now, why at this museum? Then again, maybe the point is just the pleasure of it all: her draftsmanship, Lautner’s appreciation, the happy clients, my awe. Even if Arahuete is pulling Revit all-nighters now, it seems clear that her mode of thinking is the hand on the paper. Her drawings are tremendous, articulating an understanding of the natural world, how flora and water features—the water features!!—can begin to engage with the interior space that we might otherwise consider architecture. A hallmark of her work—which includes her built houses in Los Angeles and Palm Springs and unbuilt proposals for a number of California sites as well as ones in Hawaii—is the absolutely fluid interaction between inside and outside, taken here far beyond Lautner.

And maybe that’s ultimately one of the subtler—but more effective—points of From Within. Without ever seeking to say so explicitly, the show certainly invited me to think about how much of what I had always considered Lautner’s genius might in fact have been Arahuete’s. I also wonder if perhaps Perea was prevented from making even bigger interpretive leaps in that direction or if she limited herself. Either way, it’s clear that so much of Lautner’s office was really Arahuete’s world; we’re just lucky enough to get to try to live near it.