September 8, 2024Back in the late-1940s, when Damon Lawrence was six years old, his elementary school teacher in Los Angeles set him and his classmates a task — to draw their home. When she saw his depiction, she was perplexed. “She said, ‘That can’t be,’ because I drew a house with a flat roof, and there weren’t really any at the time,” he recalls. “She said, ‘Try again!’ And I did. And finally, she called my mother because she was concerned I was delusional.”
His parents — Rita and Max Lawrence — were the driving forces behind the iconic mid-century modern ceramics firm Architectural Pottery, which is the subject of a new book, Architectural Pottery: Ceramics for a Modern Landscape, published by Phaidon imprint Monacelli, as well as a stellar exhibition at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), in Pomona, California. Running through March 2, 2025, the show features 120 different pieces.
“They shared a passion for living in their time,” Lawrence says of his parents, both die-hard modernists. “They had a vision of wanting a better future in the world.” In the early years of their marriage, Rita and Max lived successively in three homes by Gregory Ain, whose work was inspired by Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. Among these was a unit with an overhanging flat roof in Ain’s Mar Vista housing development.
In 1953, they moved to a home in Bel Air decorated by Hendrik Van Keppel, of the influential design firm Van Keppel-Green. They were also friends with such creative icons as furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames and architect A. Quincy Jones.
The products they developed for Architectural Pottery have gained cult status. “The company was always in a league of its own,” one of the book’s authors, Jeffrey Head, tells Introspective. “The shapes were very innovative, and they’ve remained that way because they’re so unique and identifiable.”
Craig Ellwood and Pierre Koenig specified pieces from Architectural Pottery for their Case Study Houses. Items from the company could be found in the home Rafael Soriano designed for legendary photographer Julius Shulman in the Hollywood Hills, and in 1955, the brand-new Beverly Hilton hotel ordered nearly 200 of the firm’s planters. In an article in Los Angeles Magazine 12 years later, Max was quoted as saying, “Wilshire Boulevard is almost an embarrassment to us. The plants growing in front of every major building are in our pots.”
The book recounts the genesis of the firm, which grew out of a project ceramist LaGardo Tackett assigned a group of students at the California School of Art in Los Angeles for which they were to design large-scale ceramic garden ware. The results were displayed in an exhibition at a nursery in Brentwood that was covered by Life magazine. At the show’s conclusion, two of the students — John Follis and Rex Goode — acquired the rights to all the pieces and decided to go into business with the Lawrences, to whom they were introduced by the graphic designer Louis Danziger.
For Rita and Max, the sleek, unornamented, geometric student designs filled a gap in the market. “They came to realize there were very few furnishings and accessories that looked in place in the modern environment,” says Jo Lauria, another of the book’s coauthors and the curator of the AMOCA show. “That was the great motivation behind starting the company.”
Rita began working from a desk in the couple’s bedroom, with a very firm sense of purpose. “We wanted the business to be . . . dedicated to producing the good and the needed,” she later stated. “There always had to be a real need to provide something that no one else was providing.”
Her lively and sociable personality shines through in the book. A true people person, she took on a number of roles at the company, simultaneously acting as head of operations, chief of publicity and marketing and creative director.
In general, the designers she chose were not particularly well-known. (The one exception was Paul McCobb, who created three pots with extremely simple forms in 1961.) They also came from diverse fields. Malcolm Leland was a sculptor, Follis and Goode were mainly graphic designers, and Tackett worked most of his career as an industrial designer.
Tackett was among the most prolific of Architectural Pottery’s collaborators. He came up with more than 50 designs, such as his now-iconic totems and Hourglass planter. Other seminal pieces produced by the firm include Follis’s peanut-shaped F–507 planter, Jack Morris’s Sombrero M-109 bisque planter and Marilyn Kay Austin’s Egg floor vase.
In 1961, David Cressey was hired as both artist in residence and production chief. Cressey brought about a distinct stylistic revolution, introducing more color and a greater use of texture. A number of his designs have highly complex forms, and he was always keen to endow his creations with a handmade feel.
The early to mid-sixties were possibly the heyday of Architectural Pottery, It had its own showroom on South Robertson Boulevard, its own manufacturing plant in Manhattan Beach and more than 200 employees. The firm also started branching out into other areas, such as floor and wall tiles for commercial buildings, furniture, signage and objects made of fiberglass. “I think that expansion was detrimental ultimately,” says Jeffrey Head. “It took the focus away from the pottery, and I think that’s what led to its downfall”.
You get the impression that the company ran away from Max and Rita. Under pressure from senior management to accelerate growth, the couple sold it to a group of employees in 1974. A decade later, it was on the brink of liquidation when a fire destroyed the Manhattan Beach workshop, bringing an end to Architectural Pottery’s output.
The Lawrences’ avowed goal was to produce “the classics of the future” and to pioneer “products that would stand the test of time.” That has certainly proved to be the case.
In 2011, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art chose two images to publicize its show “California Design, 1930–1964: Living in a Modern Way.” One was a photo of an Eames chair, the other a photo of an Architectural Pottery totem. And many of the firm’s vintage pieces have become highly collectible.
As the book’s third coauthor, Dan Chavkin, notes, “There’s a fraternity of people who are so passionate about the pieces.” A David Cressey glazed Phoenix planter, which retailed for $100 when it was manufactured, in 1966, can sell for up to $10,000 today.
Rita died in 1999 and didn’t get to witness the revival of interest in the firm’s work. Max, however, lived until 2010, dying just few weeks shy of his 99th birthday. “At the end of his life, he had a small parade of regular visitors,” recounts Damon Lawrence’s wife, Marian. “People would come and interview him. I think he was a bit bemused by it, but it gave him a lot of pride. He felt like he and Rita had set out with a mission, which they’d gone after and achieved.”
