Mauer Residence
Organic Architecture · Structural Series
The Bent and the Free Ceiling
John Lautner's Mauer Residence, 1946 — and the postwar structural series that changed how he thought about space
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| Bent Frames installed in Mauer Residence during construction |
In the years immediately following the Second World War, John Lautner was working on a problem. Not a client problem, or a site problem — a structural one. What would happen if the roof didn't need the walls to stand up? What kind of plan becomes possible when load-bearing has been completely removed from the interior? Between roughly 1945 and 1949, he designed at least four houses in direct response to that question, each a different material and geometric answer to the same underlying idea. The Mauer Residence, built in 1946 on a hilltop in Mount Washington, is where that inquiry produced one of its most resolved and most intimate results.
Wright Passes the Client
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| Mauer Residence design by Frank Lloyd Wright |
The story of the Mauer Residence begins before the war, and with a different architect. Dr. Edgar and Allison Mauer had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a house for the Mount Washington site in 1939 — a small one-bedroom plan that would, by several accounts, have been among the first Usonian houses. The war intervened. Wartime priority numbers made construction impossible, and by the time peace came, the Mauers had two sons and needed something larger. A new Wright design was beyond their means.
Wright came to Los Angeles to lecture at USC. Lautner drove him around the city. In a gesture that speaks to the depth of the relationship between them, Wright introduced Lautner to the Mauers as his superintendent in the Los Angeles area, and told them it would be perfectly acceptable for Lautner to design new plans — if that was their choice. It was. The succession was not a rejection but an act of confidence: Wright was entrusting his most capable former apprentice with clients he had come to know and respect.
What followed was Lautner's opening question to his new clients. In Alan Hess's monograph on Lautner's work, the exchange is recorded plainly: "Would you mind living in a warehouse if it gave you the space you wanted?" The Mauers answered without hesitation. "Not if you design the warehouse." The entire structural ambition of the house is contained in that exchange.
The Prefabricated Independent Roof
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| Mauer Residence Section by John Lautner |
In the 1978 SCI-Arc interview, Lautner described what he had been developing in the period just after the war ended: "I started working on various methods of doing prefabricated independent roof structures." The key word is independent. The roof structure stands on its own, resolved at the perimeter, transferring no loads through interior partitions or walls. The floor plate below becomes structurally irrelevant to the roof above. The plan is free.
The system he developed for the Mauer Residence was a series of prefabricated asymmetrical plywood bents, engineered in collaboration with structural engineer Edgardo Contini. Lautner described the members as built from thin plywood sheets over a wood frame — construction logic borrowed from aircraft wing manufacture, where the skin itself participates in carrying loads rather than simply enclosing them. This stressed-skin, or monocoque, approach produced structural members that were both lightweight and stiff in bending: ideal for a shoestring postwar budget that had to stretch over the entire house.
"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 word asymmetrical in Lautner's own project description is critical. Looking at the section drawing published in the Hess monograph, one leg of each bent is shorter than the other. The structural geometry is not neutral — it is directional. The sloping ceiling that results is not a design choice applied on top of structure. It is structure, made spatial. The form of the bent is the form of the room.
Lautner wrote in his own project notes that the low space formed under the bents, supporting a high and free sloping ceiling, "provided an ideal environment for the Mauers, who were both short, suiting their size and feelings." This is Lautner at his most characteristic: a structural decision resolved into a spatial one, and the spatial decision resolved into a human one. The sequence is always in that order.
Structure as Armature, Enclosure as Infill
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| Mauer Residence Floor Plan by Architect John Lautner |
The procurement logic of the Mauer Residence was as innovative as the structural system itself. Because the bent roof was genuinely independent — a self-supporting object that could be erected and left standing while the rest of the house was assembled around it — Lautner was able to subcontract the roof structure separately. Hess's monograph is explicit: costs were dramatically reduced because the roof could be built on its own, and all that remained afterward was to enclose the space between floor and roof with glass doors and walls. Dr. Mauer served as his own general contractor, working weekends with an exceptional foreman, two carpenters, and one mason. The entire house was finished in six months.
The total cost was $10,000. Lautner's closing note in his project description: "This was 1946. It would be a virtual impossibility today."
This separation of roof structure from enclosure anticipates ideas that would not have formal names for another two decades — open building theory, support and infill frameworks, the notion that a structural armature can host different habitable arrangements. Lautner arrived at it not through theory but through the practical problem of building something new with almost no money.
What the Structure Enables Inside
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| Interior Plywood Bents photograph Fritz Block |
Because the bents resolve all their loads at the perimeter foundations, the floor plate carries no structural obligation. The plan published in the Hess monograph confirms this: living room, alcove, kitchen, greenhouse, bedroom wing, car shelter — all organized under the continuous bent system with no interior columns anywhere. The plan goes where the program requires it to go, not where structure permits it.
The resulting freedom in the perimeter wall is equally significant. Lautner wrote: "The independent structure allows free divisions and glass enclosures." The pivot glass doors are the primary expression of this. Their center-pivot geometry is not only spatial — counterbalancing wind loads on the structure is a structural function. The hardware was made by Dr. Mauer himself: a pipe section housing a ball-bearing set into the concrete floor. The owner didn't just build the house; he fabricated one of its primary structural connections.
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| Mauer Residence Pivot Doors photograph Julius Shulman J.Paul Getty Trust Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10) |
A skylight strip runs along the high edge of the bent roof, between the opaque ceiling plane and the top of the glass walls. Lautner's own note explains its purpose precisely: it "reduces the glare from the windows and allows for a softer transition to the dark ceiling." It is also, structurally, a logical consequence of the bent geometry — the gap between the roof edge and the wall head naturally becomes glazed. At the opposite wall, sash windows are hinged together to fold open like a screen. The fireplace sits in what Lautner describes as an intimate, cave-like alcove. "The living room is part of the site," he wrote. "The distant views are the boundaries for living."
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| Exterior Trellis transition from inside to out photograph Fritz Block |
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| Exterior Trellis termination in concrete wall photograph Fritz Block |
The FHA Fight
After the plans were complete, Dr. Mauer applied for an FHA construction loan. The local board rejected the application. The design was too unconventional — even though federal law would have allowed approval. As Lautner noted, it remained common practice to finance only stock plans. Dr. Mauer was outraged. He sued the FHA. He won. The local board grudgingly approved the loan. The house got built.
This detail matters beyond its drama. The Mauer Residence required not only an architect willing to invent a new structural system and a client willing to build the house themselves — it required a client willing to go to court to defend the right to build it. The house is the product of an unusual alignment of conviction on every side.
The Postwar Series: One Problem, Four Answers
The Mauer Residence is not a one-off experiment. In the 1978 SCI-Arc interview, Lautner said plainly that he built "about a dozen" houses with different versions of the independent roof system before moving on to other structural ideas. At least four of them are well documented and form a coherent group — each a different material and geometric response to the same central question.
Mauer Residence (Los Angeles, 1946) — Prefabricated asymmetrical plywood bents, aircraft-wing construction, engineered by Edgardo Contini. The bents are linear and repeating; the asymmetry creates the sloped ceiling as a direct product of structural geometry. Low budget, owner-built enclosure.
Carling Residence (Los Angeles, 1947) — Hexagonal steel roof trusses carried at the perimeter, the inhabited plan free to extend beyond the structural boundary. Skylights resolve the gap. Where the Mauer uses a linear series of bents, the Carling uses a single spanning structural geometry.
Jacobsen Residence (Los Angeles, 1947) — The same hexagonal steel truss system as the Carling, applied to an entirely different plan geometry. Lautner demonstrated that the roof structure and the floor plan were genuinely independent variables: the same structural system could host completely different ways of living.
Gantvoort Residence (Flintridge, 1947) — Factory-type bow-shaped steel trusses with sloped legs, again engineered by Contini. The legs are deliberately inclined to resist seismic and wind loads, a direct structural response to Southern California conditions. A wood trellis at the bottom of the trusses provides lateral bracing while simultaneously defining space — dividing dining from living, marking the central corridor. The truss system extends out into the landscape, covering a partial patio. Mr. Gantvoort, like Dr. Mauer, acted as his own contractor. The interior photographs show the truss soffit as the ceiling, fully exposed, the structure inseparable from the architecture it produces.
"The high trusses create a universal space with few columns, which allows exterior and interior partitions to be placed for program purposes."
— Alan Hess, The Architecture of John Lautner, on the Gantvoort Residence
What the series makes visible is a mind working through a structural hypothesis rather than repeating a successful formula. Each house explores a different span geometry, a different material, a different relationship between structural module and plan freedom. Plywood bents, hexagonal steel trusses, bow-shaped factory trusses — the structural language changes with each project. The underlying question stays constant: what becomes possible in a plan when the roof stands on its own?
What also stays constant is Edgardo Contini, the structural engineer on at least the Mauer and Gantvoort projects, and very likely others in the group. Contini was one of the key structural collaborators in postwar LA modernism, and his repeated partnership with Lautner on these experimental lightweight systems reflects the kind of architect-engineer relationship that only works when both parties are genuinely invested in solving a problem rather than managing liability. The structural drawings for the Gantvoort published in the Hess monograph are labeled simply: Structural Engineering by Edgardo Contini.
A Lifelong Friendship, and a Pine Tree
Lautner and the Mauers became lifelong friends. After Dr. Edgar Mauer died, Lautner planted a pine tree on the property. It is still there.
The chairs visible in the estate sale photographs are believed by the family to have been designed by Lautner himself, and are currently being restored. The original commercial-grade kitchen — a specification driven entirely by Allison Mauer, who served as general contractor and clearly knew what she wanted in a kitchen — remains in the house. The original oven is being restored as part of the current work.
The house passed through the family, was occupied for decades by Dr. Mauer's daughter, and suffered years of deferred maintenance and a significant hoarding situation. David, the Mauers' grandson, inherited the house and has begun the process of restoration with his partner Elizabeth Godley, who has been documenting the work. From a preservation standpoint, the situation is about as favorable as it could be: the original material is largely intact, there are no bad remodels to undo, and the structural system — though wood, and therefore more vulnerable than Lautner's later concrete work — appears to be all there. The house needs work, not reinvention.
What the Mauer Tells Us
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| Mauer Residence Exterior photograph Julius Shulman J.Paul Getty Trust Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10) |
The Mauer Residence is often overshadowed in the Lautner canon by the concrete houses that came later — the Chemosphere, the Sheats-Goldstein, the Garcia, the Silvertop. That is understandable. Those houses are more visually dramatic and more materially durable. But the postwar prefabricated series, including the Mauer, represents something equally important: Lautner working at the scale of the problem itself, not at the scale of the image.
He was not trying to make a house that looked unprecedented. He was trying to make a house where the roof standing independently of the walls was a solved engineering fact, and where everything that followed — plan freedom, perimeter glazing, the sloped ceiling that fit the Mauers' height, the pivot door hardware built by the client himself — was a consequence of that fact rather than a decoration applied to something more conventional underneath.
That sequence — structural idea to spatial consequence to human fit — is the core of what Lautner meant by organic architecture. The Mauer Residence is a small house. It proves the idea at the smallest possible scale, with the least possible money, and with a family who sued a federal agency to build it. That is not a footnote. That is the whole idea.
Primary sources: Lautner project description and drawings in Alan Hess, The Architecture of John Lautner (Rizzoli, 1999); John Lautner, SCI-Arc Interview Part 1, 1978 (SCI-Arc Media Archive). Photographs by Julius Shulman, J. Paul Getty Trust / Getty Research Institute (2004.R.10).
The Whole Idea · Sullivan → Wright → Lautner · Organic Architecture
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