John Lautner (1911–1994) was an American architect who worked mainly in California, mostly on houses, and is best remembered for his part in the Googie style and for several Atomic Age houses of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Marquette, Michigan, he joined Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship in 1933. He opened his own practice in 1938; his commissions of 1949–50 included Googie's Coffee House. The Elrod House (1968), perhaps his most widely seen work, became famous as a location in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever.
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The Pearlman Mountain Cabin at Idyllwild (1957) is built as a cylinder on a circular platform over a large boulder among pines, its flat, overhanging roof carried on tree trunks set around it. The Chemosphere (Malin Residence) in Los Angeles (1960), a one-storey octagon reached by a funicular, stands on a concrete column nearly 30 feet high; Encyclopædia Britannica once called it "the most modern home built in the world". The Sheats-Goldstein Residence in Los Angeles (1963), designed from 1961, takes its cave-like form from the sandstone ledge it is built on.
