The Chemosphere, Hollywood Hills

If you look up at the San Fernando Valley side of the Hollywood Hills, you may spot an octagonal house perched on a single concrete column like a flying saucer on a stick. That is the Chemosphere, designed in nineteen sixty by architect John Lautner for Leonard Malin, a young aerospace engineer with a steeply sloping lot and thirty thousand dollars to spend. The site dropped at a forty-five-degree angle and was considered unbuildable by conventional methods.

Lautner solved the problem by planting one twenty-nine-foot-high concrete pillar in the hillside and cantilevering the eight-sided house around it. Construction costs ran to one hundred forty thousand dollars, partly offset by the Southern California Gas Company and a corporation called Chem Seal, whose sponsorship gave the house its name. The Encyclopedia Britannica called it the most modern home built in the world.

Julius Shulman photographed it in a now-famous image that made it an icon of California Modernism. Today it is owned and preserved by publisher Benedikt Taschen.