John Lautner Returns to Sheats Goldstein Residence

Architectoid · Art & Architecture

Architectones at Sheats-Goldstein

Xavier Veilhan returns a ghost to its masterwork

In May 2013, French artist Xavier Veilhan staged a quiet act of architectural reanimation at one of Los Angeles's most charged addresses. His traveling exhibition Architectones — a series of site-specific interventions installed across seven landmark modernist buildings between 2012 and 2014 — had already visited Richard Neutra's VDL Studio and Pierre Koenig's Case Study House No. 21. But its stop at the Sheats-Goldstein Residence in Beverly Crest had a different quality: more personal, more layered, and in at least one gesture, genuinely uncanny.

"This is almost like a prop. It's so related to moviemaking — and so spectacular."

— Xavier Veilhan

Veilhan's instinct was not wrong. The Sheats-Goldstein has appeared in The Big Lebowski, Charlie's Angels, and countless editorial shoots. Its coffered concrete ceiling fans out over Benedict Canyon like a frozen explosion; the glazed perimeter dissolves the boundary between room and sky. Unlike the more domestic atmosphere of the Neutra VDL House, this building doesn't invite you in so much as envelop you — cave and cantilever simultaneously. Faced with a space that already overwhelmed, Veilhan chose not to compete. He intervened with precision.

The Lautner Figure

John Lautner in the Sheats Residence master bedroom during construction, 1961

The centerpiece of the installation was a life-sized abstract sculpture of John Lautner himself — cast in bright green prismatic aluminum, positioned at the master bedroom's edge, gazing out over the canyon below. The pose was drawn directly from a 1961 photograph: Lautner at that exact spot, during the home's construction, surveying the sandstone ledge and the city beyond. Veilhan lifted the gesture out of documentary record and gave it new matter. The architect, frozen in geometric planes, surveys the same horizon six decades later.

The effect is quietly destabilizing. It is not nostalgic and not merely representational. The steel reduction of a man — tall, commanding, looking — has the force of a presence rather than a memorial.

The Full Installation

The Lautner figure was the anchor, but Architectones at Sheats-Goldstein was a fully orchestrated environment. Veilhan took the home's dominant geometry — its triangulated roofline — and extended it downward by stretching taut cords from the roof edge to the pool's perimeter below, creating one of his signature Rays structures. The house's own logic completed the artwork: the line of the concrete overhang became the origin point of a web connecting interior to landscape.

Smaller pieces distributed through the house attended to its particular history. A bronze miniature depicted Lautner, James Goldstein, and Goldstein's dog — a nod to the decades-long collaboration between architect and owner that continued until Lautner's death in 1994. Pyramids No. 1, derived from Alexander Graham Bell's experimental kite structures, picked up the home's insistent triangular theme at an intimate scale. A vinyl acetate disc — the kind used to press records — was cut into a triangle and framed. And threading through the entire space, a musical composition by Nicolas Godin of the French duo Air added an immersive sonic layer that completed Veilhan's multi-sensory argument: that architecture is experienced, not simply seen.

Permanent Residence

After the exhibition closed, James Goldstein acquired the Lautner figure directly from Veilhan and relocated it to the pathway leading to the home's entrance. The architect, in abstracted permanent form, now greets every visitor. The gesture has an elegance that exhibition-as-event lacks: the work is no longer art about a building, but part of the building's ongoing life.

Architect Duncan Nicholson with Veilhan's sculpture of John Lautner

The project was curated by François Perrin and organized by the Xavier Veilhan studio and Galerie Perrotin. It was the third Veilhan intervention in Los Angeles — following the Neutra VDL House and the Koenig Case Study House — and by all accounts the most cinematically charged, which is perhaps fitting for a home that has always known it was being watched.

Not in memory, but in matter — Lautner back inside his own masterwork.

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