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Esther McCoy, the aesthete whose prose defined Southern California’s architecture:
“Architecture is a great subject for an aesthete with a flair for dialectical thought. And Esther McCoy, in the collection of her writings just published by East of Borneo Books, knows how to invigorate art-for-art’s-sake hothouse subjects with a cooling blast of analytical precision. McCoy, who was in her mid-eighties when she died in 1989, has long been a hero among students of modern architecture in southern California, a subject scarcely defined until she came along. The exhibition devoted to her career at the Schindler House in Los Angeles—which offered tantalizing glimpses of this woman who was both a political activist and an unabashed aesthete—was a highlight of Pacific Standard Time, last fall’s salute to the arts in mid-twentieth-century southern California. What has not yet been recognized, or at least not sufficiently recognized, is the subdued power of McCoy’s prose. Now, with the publication of Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader, we can see deep into McCoy’s complex imagination.”
- Jed Perl, The Analytic Prose That Defined the Architecture of Southern California
Photo courtesy of Dexigner
