In Tuesday and Wednesday’s posts, I mentioned two inspiring women, so, since it’s International Women’s Day, let’s continue the thread by looking at another one, architecture critic Esther McCoy.
A new book about her, entitled Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader and published by East of Borneo, has just come out, while the critic was recently the subject of an exhibition at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, Los Angeles, entitled "Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Design", co-curated by Kimberli Meyer and Susan Morgan.
McCoy was born in 1904 in Arkansas and, as a young woman, attended a number of colleges, before moving to New York City. Here she became assistant to the novelist Theodore Dreiser.
In 1928 she went to Paris where she began writing fiction. Upon returning to New York she didn’t manage to find work as a writer, even though a shortened version of her unpublished novel Blackberry Winter had won a mention in Scribner’s novella competition.
In 1932 McCoy moved to Santa Monica to recover from double pneumonia, and, falling in love with California, she never left.
McCoy started reading books about local architecture, visited houses in construction and met local architects.
When the United States entered the Second World War, she enrolled in a job-training program and became an engineering draftsman. Her newly acquired skills allowed her to start drafting work for architect Rudolph M. Schindler, for whom she worked until 1947.
Discouraged to enter the architecture school at the University of Southern California because of her gender and age, McCoy started writing about architectural history and criticism.
Her sharp, lucid and readable prose endowed with a poetic twist meant that she quickly managed to get her writing published by prestigious newspapers, magazines and architectural journals.
Rejected by the Guggenheim Foundation when she was trying to get the research for "Five California Architects" off the ground in 1953, McCoy finally published it in 1960.
The volume, a guide to Modernist architecture focusing on Bernard Maybeck, Irving Gill, brothers Charles and Henry Greene and R.M. Schindler, proved McCoy was a very clever critic of the much neglected architecture of Southern California, showing that California architects were important innovators.
Further books followed, her second focusing on another local architect, Richard Neutra.
McCoy also promoted the Case Study Houses project originally launched by the magazine Arts & Architecture that focused on getting prominent L.A. architects to create small single-family houses for the middle class.
As the years passed, McCoy kept on writing and working to get Californian architecture known.
She campaigned to preserve the Dodge House and wrote and produced a short film about it, directed by Robert Snyder; she organised museum exhibitions, became an expert in Mexican and Italian art and architecture and published a sort of follow up to her Five California Architects, The Second Generation, that looks at J.R. Davidson, Harwell Hamilton Harris, Gregory Ain and Raphael Soriano.
McCoy died in 1989 in Santa Monica, unanimously considered as a chronicler of the Southern California avant-garde architecture.
Even though she wasn’t an architect, thanks to her precise descriptions and ctiticism about modern residential design in which she mixed disciplines as different as art history, sociology and economics, McCoy became known as “the mother of Modern California architecture”.
McCoy remains an almost unknown figure, so it may be worth rediscovering her through the out-of-print essays, articles, and short stories, as well as unpublished lectures, correspondence, and memoirs collected in the book Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader.
N.B. If you’re on the lookout for further inspiring women check out The Daily Beast’s list of 150 Fearless Women.
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Posted by: missouri architects | March 08, 2013 at 11:57 AM