he recalled: Throughout his life Lautner was a passionate admirer of his mentor (to whom he typically referred as "Mr. Wright") and he remained a dedicated practitioner of Organic Architecture. His oral history interviews reveal that he had little regard for the International Style and its leading architects: Nevertheless, even during the time he worked under Wright, Lautner sought to establish his own individual and distinctive style: Although his earlier works not surprisingly displayed some of the influence of his mentor, Lautner gradually developed his own style and consciously avoided anything that could be classified as "Wright-influenced". An exception among his later commissions to this was the Wolff House in West Hollywood (1963) which was often cited by his critics as a "Wrightian" building, much to his chagrin, but as he explained in 1986: As Lautner explained,The main thing Wright stressed was to have a total idea. If you didn't have a total idea, you didn't have anything. All you had was an assembly of cliches. I never used any of his forms, never copied anything. He was against that.Lautner's approach to architecture embodied many of Wright's philosophies and preoccupations, above all, the notion of a building as a "total concept". Like Wright, his work also shows a strong preoccupation with essential geometric forms – the circle and the triangle are dominant motifs in both his overall designs and his detailing – and his houses are similarly rooted in the idea of integrating the house into its location and creating an organic flow between indoor and outdoor spaces, although Lautner's work arguably took the latter concept to even greater heights. Another point of similarity is that, like Wright, many of Lautner's houses were sited in elevated locations or "difficult" sites – hillsides or seashores – and were expressly designed to take full advantage of the vistas these sites offered; he also followed Wright's dictum of building on a slope rather than on the very top of a hill. Lautner's work is especially significant for its radical expansion of both the technical and spatial vocabulary of domestic architecture. He achieved this through his use of the latest building technologies and materials, e.g., his pioneering use of glue-laminated plywood beams, steel beams and sheeting, and especially his ongoing exploration of the architectural possibilities of reinforced and prestressed concrete – and through his use of non-linear, open-plan and multi-level layouts, shaped and folded