Think Different: Wright, Lautner, and Sullivan

In 1997, Apple ran an ad that had nothing to do with computers.

No specs. No features. Just a montage of people who changed the world by refusing to accept it as given — Einstein, Picasso, Amelia Earhart, Muhammad Ali. The tagline: Think Different. It was a corporate campaign, yes, but it named something real: the pattern that separates people who reshape a field from those who simply practice it.

When Jobs later unpacked what the campaign actually meant, the principles were straightforward — define your core values and hold them, let consistency of conviction outlast any single project, make people feel something before you explain anything, and differentiate not by style but by genuine belief. He wasn't describing marketing. He was describing the only kind of work that survives its moment.

Architecture has its own version of that list.

Frank Lloyd Wright faced bankruptcy more than once, rebuilt Taliesin twice after devastating fires, and spent decades dismissed by an architectural establishment that found his ideas either too radical or too romantic. He kept building anyway — not because he was stubborn, but because he had a conviction so fully formed it didn't require external validation. His core value was singular and uncompromising: buildings should grow from the ground like organisms, not be assembled like machines. Every project for sixty years was a restatement of that position. By the time the Guggenheim opened in 1959, the year of his death, the consistency had become its own argument.

John Lautner inherited that foundation and extended it without softening it. Where Wright worked within gravity, Lautner argued with it. The Chemosphere — a single octagonal pod cantilevered on a concrete column driven into a hillside so steep no contractor wanted to touch it — was built in 1960 for $30,000. The client was a young aerospace engineer who couldn't afford a flat lot. Lautner didn't see a constraint. He saw a site. That distinction is everything. Function, fully understood, includes the drama of a roof that seems to defy the hill beneath it — the experience of the space is the function, taken seriously to its limit.

Lautner spent much of his career broke and professionally marginalized, his work too idiosyncratic for mainstream taste. He didn't pivot. He continued building what he believed — the Garcia House, the Elrod House, the Sheats-Goldstein — each one a full restatement of a philosophy held without apology.

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Louis Sullivan, whose office Wright came up through, coined form follows function — and spent his later years watching that phrase get flattened into justification for modernism he never intended. He died broke in a cheap Chicago hotel room in 1924. While the International Style was looking to Europe for a new architectural order, Sullivan was after something else entirely — a genuinely American architecture, ornament and all, rooted in this continent's land and democratic ideals rather than imported from abroad. The ones people still travel to see are Sullivan's.

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What connects Wright, Lautner, and Sullivan isn't talent. Plenty of talented architects built forgettable work in the same era. What connects them is the willingness to hold a position against pressure. To have a why that doesn't shift with the market or the moment — and to let that why generate the work rather than the other way around.

The misfits Jobs was honoring weren't misfits by choice. They were misfits by conviction.

You can see it in a Lautner roof sweeping up like it's trying to leave the ground. In a Wright hearth positioned at the absolute center of a plan — a declaration that fire and shelter are the point of a house. In Sullivan's botanical ornament on the Carson Pirie Scott building, intricate and insistent, because Sullivan believed beauty was not a luxury but a structural requirement of civilized life.

Think different isn't a slogan. It's a description of what it costs to build something that lasts.

Conner & Perry Architects practices in the tradition of Organic Architecture — Los Angeles.