| | TITLE | Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader | IMPRINT | East of Borneo Books | PRICE US | $34.95 CDN $34.95 | ISBN | 9780615528236 TRADE | FORMAT | Pbk, 6 x 8.25 in., 392 pgs, 6 b&w. | CATALOG | FALL 2012 p. 130 | DISTRIBUTOR | D.A.P. | PUB DATE | 5/30/2012 | STATUS | Active | STOCK | In stock |
| The first anthology of McCoy's influential writings on midcentury Californian architecture."Reading through Piecing Together Los Angeles, edited by Susan Morgan, we are in the company of a writer with a reach that takes her way beyond architecture. Among the strongest pieces included are a series of memoirs, in which McCoy describes friends and personal experiences with the same exactitude she brings to buildings and architectural ideas. The opening essay, 'Patchin Place: A Memoir,' with its small cast of oddball characters, is one of the best things ever written about Greenwich Village in the late 1920s. McCoy composes a portrait in miniature of Bonnie Grainger, a novelist who ran a speakeasy in her home and 'also played the guitar—cowboy songs, sea shanties, English folk songs and, after hearing Pablo Casals, she searched through second hand music stores for Bach scores, which she played.' McCoy’s memories are sharp and concise. Her few pages about living on Zuma Beach in Malibu in the 1930s, when 'everybody who stopped off at the beach cottage…was looking for work,' convey a melancholy no longer easy to associate with that part of the world. And she offers a beautiful account of the death of Theodore Dreiser, for whom she had worked on and off as a researcher for years. Everything is glinting suggestions, nothing is held too long. She recalls Helen, Dreiser’s wife, saying 'You know why Teddy likes you, don’t you?' And McCoy continues: 'for some reason, not wanting to hear why, I had laughed, and she had joined me in laughter and so I never really knew. It was unlike me to guard myself against knowing; but I had.'"Jed Pearl, The New Republic | NEW & FORTHCOMING Edited by Barbara Steiner. Text by Peio Aguirre, Kit Hammonds, Tone Hansen, Oliver Klimpel, Jaroslaw Lubiak, Filip Luyckx, Lena Prents, Esra Sarigedik Öktem, Joanna Sokolowska, Miko uvakovic, Christian Teckert, Jun Yang.
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JOVIS Edited by Iwona Blazwick. Text by Iain Aitch, Paola Antonelli, Iwona Blazwick, Nigel Coates, Emma Dexter, Tom Greenall Rosy Head, Jonathan Hill, Claire Jamieson Anna Minton, Rowan Moore, Jake Moulson, Richard Noble, Lucy Pengilley Gibb , Fiona Raby, Alex Smith, Noam Toran, Anthony Vidler, Gilda Williams.
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| | | EAST OF BORNEO BOOKSPiecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy ReaderBy Esther McCoy. Edited and with text by Susan Morgan. 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 Architects has 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 Reader is 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 Yorker to 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.
Featured image, of Esther McCoy (left) and her
mother, c. 1947, is reproduced from Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader. | Cory Reynolds | Date: 5/10/2012
In 1945, while working as a draftsman in R.M. Schindler's office, Esther McCoy was invited to write an article on Southern California by the left-wing East Coast art journal, Direction. According to Susan Morgan, editor of East of Borneo Books' remarkable new essay collection, Piecing Together Los Angeles, McCoy responded with “Schindler: Space Architect,” and her career as an architectural writer began in earnest. McCoy's "precisely drawn firsthand account of Schindler’s practice and his dynamic use of space as a fundamental building material" is reproduced below, from Piecing Together Los Angeles.
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