Esther McCoy

This classic study of Bernard Maybeck, Irving Gill, Charles and Henry Greene, and R.M. Schindler was first published by Reinhold, then by Praeger, and then by Henry Holt before being allowed to go out to print. The demand for this book has been so great that we have reprinted it. It has been acclaimed by many prominent architects and architectural historians who consider it to be an indispensable volume on 20th-century American architecture.

Five California Architects

Esther McCoy (1904-1989) is one of the twentieth century's foremost architecture historians, and one of the greatest chroniclers of the architecture of midcentury southern California. Her 1960 book Five California Architectshas long been acknowledged as an indispensable classic, and as Reyner Banham famously observed of her, "no one can write about architecture in California without acknowledging her as the mother of us all." Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Readeris the first anthology of McCoy's writing. It features a selection of some 70 pieces--ranging from her 1945 article "Schindler, Space Architect" to "Arts & Architecture: Case Study Houses," a 1989 essay commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. From fiction for The New Yorkerto seminal essays on new architectural forms, McCoy charts the progressive edge of American idealism, from the collective utopian spirit of Jazz Age Greenwich Village, through the Depression and the war years, to the optimism of the 1950s and 1960s. In preparing this volume, writer and editor Susan Morgan extensively researched the McCoy papers at the Archives of American Art. Her editorial decisions were based, in part, on McCoy's original selections for an unrealized anthology solicited by W. W. Norton in 1968. Expanding on that project, Morgan has included essays, articles, lectures, correspondence, memoirs and short stories that illuminate the breadth and complexity of McCoy's writing and the southern California region that inspired her groundbreaking work.

An Esther McCoy Reader

Piecing Together Los Angeles

Sponsored by John Entenza's Arts & Architecture magazine, the Case Study Houses program brought new thinking, techniques, and materials to post-war California house building including Los Angeles. Contains the work of Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Craig Ellwood.

Case Study Houses, 1945-1962

Comprises the "Case study house" program of the magazine "arts and architecture". Includes brief biographical notes on the architects.

Modern California Houses

Architecture

Craig Ellwood

Richard Joseph Neutra

Richard Neutra

John Entenza (1903-1984) was one of the pivotal figures in the growth of modernism in California. During his editorship, the magazine "Arts & Architecture" championed all that was new in the arts, with special emphasis on emerging modernist architecture in Southern California. Entenza's most lasting contribution was his sponsorship of the Case Study Houses project, which featured the works of architects such as Charles Eames, Craig Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, Richard Neutra, and William Wurster. "Arts & Architecture" also ran articles and interviews on artists and designers such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, George Nakashima, George Nelson, and many other ground-breakers.

The Entenza Years

Arts & Architecture

Elizabeth A. T. Smith

This book documents Arts & Architecture magazine's sponsorship of some of the most important architects of the region and the generation reflecting an unprecedented commitment to reinventing the house as a way of redefining living.

Esther McCoy

Books

Your next favorite book is out there