December 3, 2005
For Immediate Release: "Architectural Pottery": December 3rd, 2005- January 21 St, 2006
Solo Projects
177 South Sycamore Ave
Los Angeles California 90038
Solo Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of ceramic planters designed by the 1950’s Los Angeles firm Architectural Pottery. Max and Rita Lawrence started architectural Pottery in 1950 in Los Angeles. Students John Follis and Rex Goode started to make large-scale planters as a project for a class taught by ceramic artist LaGardo Tackett at the California School of Art in Pasadena in the late 1940’s. Artists included in the years to follow were furniture designers Paul McCobb and Malcolm Leleand. In 1940, the influential Los Angeles based magazine Arts and Architecture covered the first exhibition, reporting “the basis of the assignment that the students strive for a design commission to establish a commercial line of garden pottery for national distribution”. Their initial exhibition drew an overwhelming positive response and a great deal of press. The business that was launched secured the planters a stronghold among other iconic California pieces from the period, like the Eames chairs, that continue to define West Coast modernism. A local nursery (Evans and Reeves) commissioned the students to design the pottery and the merchandising and, shortly thereafter, entrepreneurs Max and Rita Lawrence signed on to head the Architectural Pottery firm (AP). and to spearhead a more extensive marketing and manufacturing of the planters. Under their direction, AP grew to include a wide range of fiberglass planters and seating for commercial and institutional environments. In 1951, most of the planters in the catalogue were selected for the Museum of Modern Art “Good Design” exhibition. By the early 1960’s AP outfitted many malls and parking lots with moveable planters, and the team grew to include designers Elsie Crawford and Raul Angulo Coronel and others as well as the founding designers. When the craft movement became popular in the sixties, AP produced stoneware designs by David Cressey, a student of noted studio potter Laura Anderson. Architectural Pottery attracted some of the best young talents. It was fastidious about giving royalties and as the catalogs show, credit to designers-uncommon practices at the time.
Originally Architectural Pottery started with two ideas: to evolve a high fired clay for planters that would safeguard the health of growing plants and to make these planters in a wide range of related shapes and forms keyed to the period of architecture. Skilled designers and craftsman expanded these goals to encompass not only the original natural smooth finish, but also a variety of colorful matte glazes. From planters alone, the collection grew to include sand urns, lanterns, umbrella holders, space dividers and sculpture. Architectural Pottery was used as a design tool and proven source for architects, interior designers, landscape architects, and furnishing stores. Throughout its history from 1950-1985, Architectural Pottery introduced earthenware that tempered modernism austerity while honoring the principles for which the movement stood. Ring shaped planters, X shaped floor vases, long undulating troughs, four footed Ovoid containers, the forms were so unprecedented that the best was to describe was with correlatives: the doughnut, the hour glass, the bathtub, the peanut, the canoe, Responding to the archichture of the 1950’s in Los Angeles both public and private, these planters glazed often in stark white and gorgeous colors as modernism blurred the distinction of interior and exterior space. Architectural pottery vessels placed on a patio and inside a house blurred that line further. As photographs showed the planters in living rooms and on patios of the most significant modernist architects of the day, including Rudolph Schindler, John Lautner, Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Gregory Ain, Pierre Koenig, and Richard Dorman, In 1955. Welton Beckett and Associates ordered over 200 Architectural Pottery pieces for the building and grounds of the newly opened Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles. Architectural Pottery continued to change with each decade as the 1970’s it continued to produce planters as well as fiberglass furniture that would be featured in several “California Design” exhibitions at the Pasadena Museum of Art (now the Norton Simon Museum). After weathering some dramatic changes in taste over the years, the company was forced to close after a divesting fire in 1985. Rita Lawrence has said, ”Architectural Pottery was originated to make a statement about today’s way of life, not to imitate or adapt the past”. Her vision and those of the many artists she worked with is so beautifully shown throughout Architectural Pottery’s history and this exhibition will explicate this unique vision.