ARCHITECTURAL FIBERGLASS
Planters, Benches, Trash Receptacles, Street Furniture
Architectural Pottery, David L. Krause [Designer]
Architectural Pottery, David L. Krause [Designer]: ARCHITECTURAL FIBERGLASS [Planters, Benches, Trash Receptacles, Street Furniture]. Los Angeles: Architectural Pottery, August 1965. Sales portfolio housing 21 printed sheets of product specifications. Uncoated folder lightly edgeworn. Interior sheets uniformly and lightly bumped to upper right edge. A very good set indeed.
11.5 x 8.75 folder housing product specifications for the Planters, Benches, Trash Receptacles, and Street Furniture manufactured in fiberglass by Architectural Pottery. All designs are shown in measured diagram and black and white photographs.
- 8.5 x 11 Architectural Fiberglass letterhead with typeset introduction
- 8.5 x 11 two-sided color specification chart
- 8.5 x 11 Tapered Cylinders [designed by Marilyn Kay Austin] two-sided specification sheet
- 22 x 8.5 Cylinders [designed by John Follis] two-sided 4-page folded specification sheet
- 8.5 x 11 Convex Squares [designed by Marilyn Kay Austin] two-sided specification sheet
- 8.5 x 11 Tapered Squares two-sided specification sheet
- 22 x 8.5 Squares [designed by John Follis] two-sided 4-page folded specification sheet
- 8.5 x 11 Rectangles [designed by John Follis] two-sided specification sheet
- 8.5 x 11 Geometric Elements [designed by John Follis] two-sided specification sheet
- 8.5 x 11 Ellipses single-sided specification sheet
- 8.5 x 11 Concave Squares [designed by Marilyn Kay Austin] two-sided specification sheet
- 8.5 x 11 Hexagon & Faceted Cylinder [designed by Marilyn Kay Austin] two-sided specification sheet
- 8.5 x 11 Sculptural Shapes two-sided specification sheet
- 8.5 x 11 Bevel Group [designed by William Paul Taylor] two-sided specification sheet
- 8.5 x 11 Planter Benches [designed by William Paul Taylor] two-sided specification sheet
- 22 x 8.5 Benches [designed by Douglas Deeds] two-sided 4-page folded specification sheet
- 8.5 x 11 Hanging Planters [designed by Marilyn Kay Austin] two-sided specification sheet
- 22 x 8.5 Trash Receptacles two-sided 4-page folded specification sheet
- 8.5 x 11 Prismatic Forms two-sided specification sheet
- 8.5 x 11 Fountain & Custom Shapes [designed by George Nowak] two-sided specification sheet
- 22 x 8.5 Net Price Schedule [effective August 1965] two-sided 4-page folded pricing guide
From “Max Lawrence dies at 98; co-founder of L.A.'s Architectural Pottery” the Los Angeles Times obituary by Elaine Woo, August 01, 2010: Max and Rita Lawrence founded Architectural Pottery in 1950 and their business and aesthetic savvy helped the company thrive for more than three decades. Showcasing the talents of potters such as David Cressey, John Follis and Rex Goode, they sold their creations to the vanguard of the modernist architecture movement that took root in Southern California in the post- World War II era.
"Their role in establishing the unique look of midcentury California design can't be overstated. They were key," Wendy Kaplan, curator and head of decorative art and design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said of the Lawrences. LACMA featured several works from Architectural Pottery and its offshoot, Architectural Fiberglass, in "California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way.”
The hallmarks of Architectural Pottery were graceful, geometrically shaped vessels, devoid of ornamentation and often large in scale. Radical for their time, their pure forms — cylinders, cones, bullets, gourds and totems — startled the eye in 1950s America, where fat-lipped terra-cotta pots had been the standard for generations.
The company quickly made its mark, with several pieces from its first catalogue chosen for the 1951 "Good Design" exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Architects such as John Lautner and Richard Neutra ordered works from the Architectural Pottery line for the modernist houses they designed, and photographer Julius Shulman, the masterful promoter of midcentury design, featured its pots and sculptures in nearly every picture he took.
Although a fire at the Lawrences' Manhattan Beach manufacturing plant led them to shut down the business in 1985, their legacy has endured, evident particularly in the ubiquity in the California landscape of the cylindrical white planter, one of the most popular creations of Architectural Pottery.
"Whenever we see a white cylinder planted with a tree or flowers inside or outside an office building or a bank, and now quite often at gasoline stations, all of that is the heritage of Architectural Pottery," said Bill Stern, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Museum of California Design.
In 1949, when the Lawrences saw the work of La Gardo Tackett and his students from the now-defunct California School of Arts in Pasadena, they recognized that their streamlined ceramics could fill the void. They offered what Rita Lawrence later described as a "portable landscape" that could unify the interior and exterior environments. Architectural Pottery would bring the new style of ceramics to the marketplace.
Architects began ordering the Lawrences' wares almost as soon as the first catalog was published in 1950. It wasn't long before a piece by Architectural Pottery was considered as necessary in the modernist home as an Eames chair.
The Lawrences respected their artisans, allowing them to take credit for their creations and paying royalties — uncommon practices at the time in California's ceramics industry. Their well-known potters included Malcolm Leland, who designed an iconic gourd-shaped bird feeder, and Tackett, who designed an hourglass-shaped ashtray that became a fixture in office building elevator bays.
The cylindrical white planter mushroomed in popularity after more than 200 were ordered in 1955 for the then-new Beverly Hilton Hotel.
"Wilshire Boulevard is almost an embarrassment to us," Max Lawrence said some years later. "The plants growing in front of every major building are in our pots."