Goldstein Office by John Lautner
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| Goldstein Office. Image from the cover of the John Lautner monograph. |
Among John Lautner's most celebrated works — the Chemosphere, the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, Silvertop — there exists a near-unknown masterpiece that most architecture lovers have never seen. The Goldstein Office, designed by John Lautner for James Goldstein and completed in 1989, is an 850-square-foot room that consumed a year and a half of labor, the finest tradespeople in Los Angeles, and a level of craftsmanship that most architects never get to ask for — let alone build. It has been sitting in a warehouse ever since.
The project was originally conceived as a tenant improvement for a high-rise office building on the 20th floor in Century City. On paper, it was described as "simple and easy." In practice, as the builder Roban Poirier quickly discovered, John Lautner's definition of those words bore no resemblance to anyone else's.
Lautner designed an interior that treated the space as a complete architectural environment — not a decorated room, but a unified piece of art. Every surface, joint, and detail was resolved with the same rigor he brought to his residential work. The carpentry joinery was executed to within 1/64th of an inch. Master mason Floyd Darrensbourg, cabinet maker Charley Rausch, master glazier Lee Whiteside, and master carpenter Alan Stassforth — each a specialist at the top of their trade — gave the project their best work. It shows.
What makes this story particularly instructive for any architect is what the process reveals about the relationship between design and construction. The most difficult part of the job, Poirier later noted, wasn't the joinery or the materials — it was the management of the building's own superintendent, described memorably as "Napoleonic," and the constant battle for access to the freight elevator. Great architecture, even at the scale of a single room, has always had to fight its way into existence.
The office was completed. It was installed. And then it was dismantled.
The completed Goldstein Office was eventually taken apart and packed into 80 large crates, where it sat in a warehouse awaiting a future home. In the meantime, James Goldstein commissioned a new office from architect Duncan Nicholson — the man who would later train the founders of Conner & Perry Architects — built as the Goldstein Tennis Pavilion at the Sheats-Goldstein Residence.
LACMA currently holds the crated office and has long planned to reassemble it as a permanent installation — at one point rumored as the office of director Michael Govan. That day has not yet arrived. When it does, it will be one of the most concentrated examples of built craft on display in any museum in the world: an intact Lautner interior, complete, in a city that loves him but rarely gets to experience his work up close.
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| The floorplan of the office is angled to the existing space. A new faceted wood ceiling, a sloped slate and glass partition screening off the secretary area, black slate floors, and a screen-like wall of reflecting copper create the feeling of an unconfined space — eliminating any sense of a box. |
The office occupied the northern side of the 20th floor at 10100 Santa Monica Boulevard in Century City, with views toward the Los Angeles Country Club and the Santa Monica Mountains beyond. Lautner divided the 850 square feet into two zones: a reception and secretary area clad entirely in black slate — walls, cantilevered desk, and floor — and Goldstein's private office, whose walls are sheathed in copper. Partial-height walls between the two zones are topped with glass that rises to meet an undulating Douglas fir ceiling. Every material choice is load-bearing in a design sense: the slate grounds the entry, the copper warms the inner sanctum, and the timber ceiling moves like a wave above it all.
"In designing a building or solving an architectural problem, the major element is the interior space that you create, which is first of all a human space, a free space. From that derives the structure and the detail and the whole thing."
— John Lautner
"There's very little drawing, there's a lot of thinking. I beat my brains out about how to do whatever is necessary for the whole project. Sometimes I sit for hours before I draw anything."
— John Lautner
The video below, produced by the John Lautner Foundation, gives a rare look at the office before it was dismantled.
The Goldstein Office is a proof of argument. Not a statement about what architecture can look like — a demonstration of what it takes to make it. A year and a half of labor for 850 square feet. Joinery held to 1/64th of an inch. Materials selected not for effect but for consequence: slate to ground, copper to warm, timber to move. Every decision locked together into a single interior that does what Lautner always insisted interiors must do — eliminate the sense of enclosure while remaining completely built.
The fact that it sits in 80 crates in a warehouse is not a tragedy. It is a condition — the same condition that faces every piece of architecture that refuses to be ordinary. It waits for a room adequate to what it is. LACMA has the crates. The city is waiting.
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