In Diamonds are Forever, when Sir Sean Connery’s 007 encounters a lissom pair of henchwomen named Bambi and Thumper, something incredible happens: he’s upstaged. Not by his underdressed assailants, but by his surroundings. The secret agent’s bright pink tie and gymnastic fisticuffs are mere accents, set against the unsculptured rock and curved concrete of a home in Palm Springs known as The Elrod House.

This disorientating trick-of-location is no isolated movie phenomenon. The architectural star of Mr Brian De Palma’s Body Double is the octagonal Malin Residence (aka the Chemosphere) set on a column overlooking the San Fernando Valley: it’s hard to imagine a better location for the sleazy nocturnal shenanigans of the film’s voyeuristic hero. Likewise, the Sheats Goldstein Residence in The Big Lebowski, where Mr Jeff Bridges, as The Dude, is entertained poolside by pornographer Jackie Treehorn beneath a majestic, cavernous, scene-stealing roof. Background, once again, becomes foreground.

These buildings are the spectacular handiwork of architect Mr John Lautner, whose reputation for unconventional brilliance has only grown in the 20 years since his death, age 83, in 1994. For six decades he expressed his boundless creativity in unique structures throughout Southern California, and beyond. His buildings have been seen by millions, even though his name – until recently – has been known by relatively few. Largely under-appreciated in his lifetime, Mr Lautner became an unsung cinematic hero, the invisible hand behind some of Hollywood’s most remarkable, yet real-life, locations.

Strangely, he reserved little affection for Los Angeles, the city that unconditionally embraced him with its spectacular geography and endless supply of creative, wealthy clients. He skewered the artless rich of LA as “dirty, cheating bastards” and dismissed the work of many LA-based fellow architects: Mr Richard Neutra, he maintained, “just did the same thing”.

There can be no doubt, though, that Mr Lautner had a star quality befitting his reluctantly adopted West Coast home. “He looked a little bit like Gary Cooper, actually,” recalls architect Ms Helena Arahuete, who worked with Mr Lautner on the breathtaking Arango Residence in Acapulco, noting that he “related himself” on some level to the architect played by Mr Cooper in The Fountainhead. “You insist on designing buildings that look like nothing ever built before,” says one character in that movie, an observation that could fairly be made of Mr Lautner.

Part “wild Irishman”, part “mechanical German”, as he himself phrased it, Mr Lautner was born and raised in Marquette, Michigan, by a family who valued a balance between intellectual and practical pursuits – between the library and the great outdoors. His father was a teacher, his mother an interior designer and artist, and at age 12 a young Mr Lautner helped build the family cabin (named Midgaard) on the wild shores of Lake Superior, using ancient Egyptian construction techniques instead of the latest machinery. After this great formative feat, anything would seem possible.

Apprenticed under master architect Mr Frank Lloyd Wright during the 1930s, at the famous Taliesin estate in Wisconsin, Mr Lautner not only picked up hands-on skills such as plumbing and carpentry, he also developed an approach to architecture that would stay with him for life. “He had the wisdom of understanding Mr Frank Lloyd Wright’s philosophy of organic architecture,” says Ms Arahuete. “And he understood it as a timeless philosophy.”

Mr Lautner cultivated a wide range of interests, all of which fed into his architecture: he admired the art of Mr Jackson Pollock and the jazz of Mr Duke Ellington. Composer Mr Billy Strayhorn once described Mr Ellington as “beyond category” – the same goes for Mr Lautner.

He made a point of working with outstanding craftsmen and excellent contractors, and never stopped professing his love of the best materials: concrete, wood and stone. What many architects merely dreamt, Mr Lautner built, and his achievements were often spectacular: the massive motorised hanging glass doors (made by an aircraft company) at The Elrod House; Silvertop’s 1,000sqft living room and infinity pool (the “Lautner edge”); the swimmable “sky moat” at the Arango Residence (Casa Marbrisa), perhaps the most beautiful alternative to poolside railings ever devised.

Mr Lautner hated “styles” – credit for the Googie restaurant trend was casually and unfairly foisted on him by dismissive architecture critics – and instead pursued what he called “real architecture” with its disdain for imitation.

Perhaps the best insight into Mr Lautner’s success and ceaseless creativity can be found in the way he fully immersed himself in his profession. He would recall the way that his mentor, Mr Lloyd Wright, never wanted any of his apprentices to take vacations, even to visit with family. That degree of dedication also became one of Mr Lautner’s hallmarks. “My whole life is devoted to architecture,” he confessed, “that’s what I live on.”

Mr Lautner had the perfect client for this project – the industrialist Mr Kenneth Reiner, who made his millions in spring-loaded hair-clips and self-locking nuts for aircraft, and who contributed a machine shop so that original parts could be made if nothing suitable already existed. The glass windows are cleverly suspended from the enormous arched roof, with no mullions to spoil the view of Silver Lake Reservoir.

Immortalised by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as “the most modern home built in the world”, yet casually dismissed as flying-saucer-esque by some critics, the Chemosphere – set on a single concrete column – was considered by the architect himself as a prototype for affordable prefab housing. Since the turn of the millennium the house has been owned and restored by publisher Mr Benedikt Taschen.

This was an ongoing project for Mr Lautner, begun in the early 1960s and later remodelled (“perfected”) right up to the architect’s death in 1994. Details such as the trapezoidal swimming pool, immense triangular roof and drinking glass skylights (750 of them in total, creating the effect of a sun-dappled forest) cohere into something wild, organic and extraordinary.

Mr Lautner conceived the “whole idea” for this, arguably his greatest work, in his usual fashion – he sat on the site and drank in the environment. When his client, Mexican supermarket magnate Mr Jerónimo Arango, saw the model he told the architect, “It’s beautiful: just go ahead and do it”, and Mr Lautner obliged, creating a sublime sky moat and marble-floored living space that seems to float.

Most architects, when faced with a narrow Malibu oceanfront lot, simply drop in a box. Not Mr Lautner, who rose to the challenge of this commission with two half catenary curves in reversed positions – which not only gifted the affluent residential strip something beautiful and unique – replete with five bedrooms, five baths and a swimming pool – but visually tied the mountains to the ocean like no other home in the vicinity.

Until Mr Lautner came along nobody had truly integrated a home into the Palm Springs desert – and this was his marvellous solution, described in a Playboy article from 1971 as “an original Far West blend of pleasure and practicality served on the rocks”. He persuaded owner Mr Arthur Elrod to further excavate the lot so that massive desert boulders could be incorporated into the design: a masterstroke.