Jacobsen Residence by John Lautner

Organic Architecture — Early Works

When the Roof Stands Alone — Hollywood Hills, 1947

---

Jacobsen Residence, Hollywood Hills, California, 1947 — Photograph: Julius Shulman Photography Archive, getty research institute

The Structure of Freedom

The Jacobsen Residence is a small house — two bedrooms, modest square footage, built into the steep Hollywood Hills overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Its economy is real. But size is not the point. The point is what Lautner had worked out for the roof, and what that roof made possible for the plan below it.

In 1947, most postwar American housing was resolved as a box: walls carry the roof, the roof defines the plan, and the plan is locked in by the structure above it. Lautner had been thinking about this problem since the end of the war — not as an aesthetic objection to the box, but as a structural one. If the roof could be made to stand independently, the floor could be anything.

"You could have this roof erected on a subcontract and then just fill in between the floor and roof — as much or as little as you want — and you still have an entity that becomes a house."

— John Lautner, SCI-Arc Interview, 1978

The Postwar Experiments

After the war, Lautner found himself without the flow of commissions that had sustained his early practice. He spent the period not in retreat but in research — working out a series of independent roof systems, each a different structural approach to the same underlying idea. Plywood fins. Steel trusses. Three-point truss columns. He built roughly a dozen variations before moving on, and in his own words each was an experiment in whether a house could be built the way factories are built: the structure erected first, the enclosure filled in according to the specific life it was meant to house.

The Carling Residence was where the three-column truss system was first realized. The Jacobsen and Polin Residences — built simultaneously on adjacent steep lots in the Hollywood Hills — brought the system to a doubled proof of concept. Two clients, two households, two entirely different floor plans. One structural roof.

Exterior — the three truss column supports are pushed to the building perimeter, eliminating the need for interior bearing walls. Your's truly standing next to one.

How the System Works

The roof of the Jacobsen Residence is hexagonal in plan — a six-sided steel truss structure carried on three column supports pushed to the building's exterior perimeter. The triangulated configuration of those three legs does something most structural systems avoid: it resolves both vertical loads and lateral loads — wind, seismic — within the truss geometry itself. There are no shear walls. The interior is structurally open.

Because the three supports handle everything, the legs can be extended or shortened independently to accommodate any terrain without changing the structural logic. On a steep Hollywood Hills lot — or any hillside — this is not a minor advantage. The roof lands where the site demands, not where the plan requires it to.

Roof plan — the hexagonal steel truss and three-column support system; note how the plan extends beyond the structural perimeter where the program required it

The roof plan tells a story the floor plan cannot: the hexagonal steel structure is a fixed, self-sufficient object. It does not change with the client or the site. The floor plan — and the life inside — flows beneath it and, crucially, beyond it. Where the program required more space than the steel roof provided, Lautner extended the plan outward and resolved the sky above with custom-built skylights. The structure was the starting point, not the constraint.

The Independent Floor

the floor plan; the inhabited plan steps beyond the structural perimeter as needed

The floor plan flows from kitchen through living room to the exterior without interruption — no columns breaking the space, no interior walls required to carry load. Sliding glass doors open the living room directly to the outside, and the threshold between interior and exterior becomes effectively continuous. The space reads as larger than its footprint because nothing inside it announces a structural obligation.

In the kitchen, where the plan steps beyond the hexagonal roof, Lautner brought in custom-built skylights. The structural logic remained intact — the roof does its work, the floor does its work — and the two are in productive conversation rather than locked in the mutual dependency of conventional construction. The skylights resolve the boundary with light rather than with wall.

exterior view from below the steel column adjust in height to fit the hillside site

Free Space

Lautner was precise about what this kind of structure produced. In his 1991 SCI-Arc lecture, describing the postwar independent roof experiments, he called the result "an eccentric, flowing space even though it's a regular system of structure." The regularity was in the roof — the hexagonal truss, the three columns, the geometry. The freedom was in everything below.

"A regular system of structure is usually a box, and it's a kind of dead affair. But this is alive. This is for living."

— John Lautner, SCI-Arc Lecture, 1991

The three columns at the perimeter also produce something that is easy to overlook in a photograph but impossible to miss in the space: a 360-degree unobstructed view. Because the structure that supports the roof is pushed outward, there are no intermediate bearing points to interrupt the horizon. The view from inside is not framed — it is continuous. Lautner described this quality in both the 1978 and 1991 lectures as a direct outcome of the structural system, not as an aesthetic decision layered on top of it.

This is the logic that runs from the Carling Residence through Jacobsen and Polin, and forward — differently resolved but philosophically continuous — to the Chemosphere's single column, the Sheats-Goldstein's roof rising from the hillside, the Elrod's concrete dome on three-point supports. In each case, the structure serves freedom. The space is the argument.

jUnder construction — the steel truss roof stands as an independent entity before the floor plan and walls below it are resolved — Photograph: Julius Shulman Photography Archive, getty research institute

Two Clients, One Roof System

The adjacent Polin Residence makes the principle explicit. Built simultaneously on the neighboring lot, it shares the identical structural system — the same hexagonal steel roof, the same three-column truss configuration — but the floor plan beneath it is entirely its own, shaped by a different site gradient and a different household. The roof is the constant. The plan is the variable.

This is not a detail of construction economy, though it is that too. It is a statement about what architecture can be when structure is resolved as an independent problem. The hexagonal truss does not dictate the rooms — it liberates them. Each house expands beyond the steel footprint as its program requires, the boundary resolved with skylights at the point of departure. The edge between the structural system and the inhabited plan is not a wall. It is light.

Living area — fireplace with built-in seating

The Timeless Test

Lautner returned to these early houses in his 1991 SCI-Arc lecture and offered a test for architecture that holds. Looking back at work thirty, forty, fifty years old, he found that the houses with genuine structural ideas were still in excellent condition — not by virtue of maintenance, but by virtue of logic. A solution that is correct does not become wrong with time.

"In looking at houses thirty or forty or fifty years old, I find that they all really do have ideas, they're all in excellent condition, and they're all timeless."

— John Lautner, SCI-Arc Lecture, 1991

The Jacobsen Residence qualifies. The structure that makes it work — three columns, six-sided roof, floor freed from the obligations above it — is not a period solution. It is a correct one for the problem Lautner defined: how to place a house on a steep site without burying it, how to give a small house the qualities of freedom that most large ones fail to achieve, how to let structure be the condition of space rather than its limit.

Interior — the free plan opens toward the hillside; the space is unencumbered by the structure above it

The Whole Idea

The Jacobsen Residence is an early house but not an incomplete one. The idea is fully stated: separate the roof from the floor, push the structure to the perimeter, and what remains inside is free. The program fills that freedom as it needs to, expanding beyond the structural boundary when required, resolved at each edge with light. Two bedrooms. Open living. A hillside view with no obstruction. A solution that can be adapted — the leg lengths changed, the floor plan varied — to any terrain, any client.

That is the whole idea of an independent roof. Not the hexagonal form, not the truss geometry — those are the instruments. The idea is that structure, correctly understood, does not constrain space. It produces it.

---

Jacobsen Residence  ·  Hollywood Hills, California  ·  1947

Architect: John Lautner  ·  Structural System: Three-Column Independent Steel Truss Roof

Related: Carling Residence (1947)  ·  Polin Residence (1947)  ·  Chemosphere (1960)