Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1960s
So anyway, my travels ended about 19 . . . Let's see, in the meantime I had some books out, 1960.
Oh, yes, I went to Brazil; the Brazilian government asked me as one of their critics to go over. I was astonished how much Arts and Architecture was prized in Europe. The people I knew, you know, they knew my name from having written for Arts and Architecture. It was unbelievable to me, because it paid little or nothing. I went to Brazil . . . Saarinen was there, too, Saarinen and Eames were at Brazil.
JG: Where, in Rio? They were at [inaudible]
EM: Yes. It was the opening of Brasilia. And Zevi was there.
JG: Bruno Zevi?
EM: Yes. It was incredible, the people in Brasilia.
JG: Now were you writing about--go ahead about Brasilia, I'm sorry.
EM: Well, I came back and did an issue for the Times on that, on the architecture.
JG: Now, during the time you were going to Mexico and to Italy were you writing about architecture in Southern California, or in the United States as well?
EM: Yes, yes.
JG: Berkeley was still alive at that time.
EM: Yes, yes. He died in '62. But it was awfully close. We lived well. We didn't have any . . . Well, there was nothing really to save because I--this was the only way I could do it, to get any reward myself [laughs] for sitting at the typewriter so closely. To take trips. And they were just paid for, they were just barely paid for. So, let's see, the first book came out in 1960.
Oh, there was a period of four months when I wrote television, and that happened when a friend of mine, a writer, had become an agent. He took some of my things, published stories, and took them around and sold them, and he sold a couple, and I got incredible prices for them, and then an extra price for writing the screenplay. Of course I work like hell, and I could bring it home if there had to be changes, and after having written all night and taking it in the morning, I could work--come home, and make the changes. So it was worth it. It paid up all our debts and got us in shape again, paid off the mortgage. I must have written about ten, and I loved it. I loved writing dialogue.
JG: What shows were they? Are these among your papers?
EM: No, oh, no, they're thrown out. They could take a good story and I don't know what they'd do--they'd just muck it up, and you know, once I went in to watch how they did it, how they could muck it up, and I even abetted them in it because they asked me if they could take out a certain character. Well, they thought that it wasn't a structural character. It was. [Both laugh loudly] What it did, it gave the actress more room on the stage to say . . .
JG: [Both laugh uncontrollably] Sorry, folks.
EM: But even there, I was going to go on; I wanted to--to do that right, and to do it well, and to get some really good . . . You know, to crack television and not just write, you know, the things . . . Well, I got so I could turn them out very fast.
[END TAPE 6, SIDE 1]
[BEGIN TAPE 6, SIDE 2] Esther , McCoy for the Archives of American Art, on Saturday, November 14th, 1987, in Santa Monica. This is side 2 of tape 6. We were talking about the...
EM: Yes. Well, this was ended when I got the contract for Five California Architects. And so then I began working--that was my downfall. Just when I had a taste of leisure and money, then this comes.
JG: You had said before that you had spent your life trying to escape the middle class, though, do you recall?
EM: Well, yes, I have escaped it. I escaped it. I escaped it at age 21 when I went to New York because I didn't want, I really didn't want possessions. And that's what appalls me at all this stuff--it's no value, but it's, you know, to have this much stuff.
JG: So you were escaping affluence by going into architectural writing? I mean, did you know it at the time?
EM: No, I didn't. And I wanted to do the book because I'd already done the catalogue for the show of the Roots of California Contemporary Architecture, that had been shown here. And so it was from that that they gave me the contract for the book. So then I worked on that for a year, and then I got the contract for the Neutra book, and came out of--turned it in in '59, the manuscript, and then went into the Neutra book. And that was, oh, that was hell. This man was no one to write about. That's when I knew that I must always write about the dead. Wherever I could. [Both laugh]
JG: So you wrote the Neutra book.
EM: Yes.
JG: Was that published before California Five [Five California Architects]?
EM: No, it was published after. They were both published in 1960. But it came out afterward. Five California Architects was delayed because the editor who commissioned it had left and . . . Did I tell you this a little while ago? The Dutchman who took over didn't like . . . He thought they were all pretty crappy.
JG: But you were able to salvage the manuscript; it went through.
EM: Well, I fought for it. You know, if you spend a year on something, by God, you're going to fight for it.
JG: And it sure proved very successful, even on their terms.
EM: Yes, yes it did.
JG: It's a remarkable book, I think. Whenever I go into an architect's library, it's always there. Sometimes it's out. It's almost hard to say why the moment for it was so right.
EM: It was slow. It was slow catching on, and I know that someone told me that he could tell, in going into a young architect's office, that it was . . . He'd see it up by the book on engineering [laughs], and knew that it was something that . . . I think the young architects liked it, because . . .
Oh, by that time, too, I'd been writing for the Italian magazines, and in Mexico I'd written a whole issue on California architecture for Architectura, the Mexican magazine. Then, in Italy, I began contributing the California architecture to the Italian art magazines. To, not Lotus, but what's the other one? Zodiac. The Pirelli magazine. I think the first thing I wrote for that was on Pierre Koenig, and then Moore, and then I did issues on young architects for them and for Lotus. Bruno Alfieri, the editor, when it died, he opened his own magazine, Lotus. So I went on writing for him.
JG: Did you save all these articles and are they in your papers?
EM: Yes, they're here. So then I would come back from Europe and publish things in Arts and Architecture and then in the Times. But after the book writing (after the Neutra), it was so traumatic, the experience with Neutra, that I was in New York . . .
JG: What was traumatic about it? He was difficult?
EM: Well, yes. He wanted me to say things that were not true. He wanted me to say that he was still in partnership with Alexander, and when the manuscript was in, I went to New York, and I sat down with Braziller. He said, "But Neutra showed me the contract--it was dated just months ago--to show that he was still in partnership with Alexander."
I said, "All right, I'll pay for the telephone calls. Let's call."
And then there was something else too about Davidson that he had said was untrue and he wanted out, so we called Alexander, and Braziller was listening, and he said that this contract was something. . . .They had had to draw up a new one because of changes.
But he said, "If you say I'm in partnership with Neutra, I'll sue you."
So then I was going to call Davidson for Braziller to hear, and Braziller said, "No, no; that's enough."
But Neutra did get his way in certain things after I'd gone. There was one point where he picked up all the photographs. He said, "They belong to me. I own the negatives; they're in Shulman's keeping, but I own them."
JG: Is that true? He owned them?
EM: Yes, that was his agreement with Shulman.
JG: So he really tried to control his image in the press?
EM: Yes he did, yes. He sent his son out to see me once, to beg me to be kind to his father. Well, God, he wanted everything changed in the book, as he wanted to see it. He wanted everything changed.
JG: You showed it to him?
EM: Yeah, I showed it to him. And then at the end, I wouldn't let him see it. But he did see it at Braziller; Braziller showed it to him.
JG: It was to create a more positive image. But was it negative to start with, or . . . ?
EM: No, no.
JG: You liked his work so there was no problem?
EM: Yeah, yeah; it was very . . . I just had to divorce him. I had to make the decision--would I stop it, or would I divorce him from his work and just look at his work.
JG: What sort of self-image did he want to portray, that would . . . ?
EM: Well, he wanted--now, for another thing, he wanted me to put the date of the Lovell house in 1927, and I said, "That isn't true." I told him I'd had a check through the records at City Hall and got the date of when the drawings were filed and when the building permit was issued, and this was 1929. And then, finally, he said, "Yes, but I like 1927, that was the year that the Barcelona Pavilion . . . " And then a couple of other things, too. He wanted to be that year.
JG: Yes, he wanted to be seminal.
EM: Yeah, uh-huh.
JG: So he was competing historically, but not with Schindler? When did Schindler do the Beach House? '23?
EM: It was underway when Neutra arrived, and I think he came in '25.
JG: So he wasn't trying to beat the Lovell house, the beach house.
EM: No, but he did get the next one.
JG: I wanted to know whether he was actually trying to lie to pre-date Schindler or . . .
EM: No.
JG: . . . but it was actually the Mies thing.
EM: And then some of the drawings for the Lovell Beach House. Lovell was having Schindler do so many things for him that a certain letter of Lovell's shows that he couldn't decide which would be done first. But many of the drawings were already in, and the sketches for the Lovell house that were done, I think, in '23.
JG: The Lovell, the Beach House?
EM: Beach House, yes.
JG: Which one first? Lovell didn't know whether he was going to build the..
EM: Well, he was doing a house in the...
JG: Los Feliz?
EM: No, he was doing a house in the country, a farm. He had a farm.
JG: Oh, I didn't know that. And Schindler had designed that too?
EM: Yes, he did that.
JG: Was that ever built?
EM: Oh, yes.
JG: I didn't know that.
EM: Yeah. A ranch house.
JG: I've never seen that illustrated.
EM: Yeah, it's in David's book. It wasn't an important house.
JG: So we were getting--Neutra . . .
EM: So that was over. That was '60, and then things began to be rather bad. It was the end of the Italy trips and work was low. I was doing some work then for [Architectural] Forum, occasional pieces for Forum, and what John paid wasn't enough. I'd have calls for things. People would call. I did, you know, things for Life magazine and for others that were unsigned. Some just doing the writing and getting the material together. That would be for unsigned pieces. At that time, loose magazines were not . . . There were no . . . signing. They were not attributed to anyone.
And let's see, about 1957 I went on publishing stories. I think the last one I published was in the end of the '50s. And then, you see, it would take some little time to write one, and if they didn't go to one of the magazines that paid well, they would wind up in the little literary magazines that didn't pay. And so I was really stuck. It just could not do it.
Impossible to do a book because there was not the money to sit down and do a book. I could do one where I was contracted for it and had an advance, but otherwise . . . And I was pretty well off books by then, and then when Berkeley died, in 1962, I said I will never, never write about architecture again. It was almost like, you know, you're casting off a lover. Immediately, people began to feel sorry for me, and the--Italy came forward and asked me to go on a trip for them. Jimmy Toland sent me to Mexico. That's where I went with Marvin Rand and... [laughs] So, then Jimmy Toland got me the trip to Mexico . . .
JG: Before we go on with this aspect of your career, what had-in the large, big canvas stuff-happened to Southern California between the war? We're backtracking here a little bit, and say 1960, how was it that California changed? I know this is a sweeping . . . This is a question that's a book, but it's my perception that it had been a much smaller place before the war, more contained; you knew people and something happened after the war. It changed . . .
EM: You knew them, just the people, I mean. There were more architects, but you knew them by their work, and there was no good work that went unnoticed in Southern California. The magazines . . .
JG: Before the war, or after the war?
EM: After the war. The magazines by this time were sending out people all the time to California, especially the magazines that wanted houses, because they were the only place that were building interesting ones. The magazine I worked for, did scouting for, in New York, Mademoiselle magazine--all their advertising was eclectic stuff, and all the houses were moderns. Everything I sent them was modern. And there were times when there would be ten houses in them and maybe eight of them would be mine. I was the only one who could put together a good package fast, I guess, and who could write on the things. Although they crapped up the writing, you know; they made them really--it was-- in first person things.
JG: They turned your articles into first person.
EM: Yeah, as if they were written by the person.
JG: By the [inaudible]?
EM: Flippant; yes, very flippant?
JG: Under your name?
EM: Oh no, no names were published. Oh yes, the name of the person, the owner, yeah.
JG: It's not as though they changed your articles into first person under your name?
EM: Oh no, oh no. I wouldn't have permitted that. Let's see. The changes? Well, the strict International Style had always been more or less corrupted here. There's very little that was not eventually corrupted by the climate, and the kind of people who live here.
JG: In what sense corrupted?
EM: Well, I mean, it was less severe. It was more . . . It was freer here.
JG: Did the weather in fact encourage the . . . You say "corrupted," but did it actually bring out the nature of International Style more in terms of flow and space?
EM: No. Well, I'm thinking about Lescaze, say. Lescaze would, you know, if he'd come out here, he would have been softened, too, I think. Neutra, was softened, at 1949, or '48, when he did the Brentwood house. You know, what's that Brentwood house? Not the one on the slope, but the flat one.
JG: Very rich materials in that.
EM: Yeah. Anyway, it was a Wright client to begin with that Neutra managed to get. It had a way of softening things, California. And it was never . . . I think Clark and Frey, in Palm Springs--it was closer there to the International Style, and then even the Neutra house in Palm Springs is very strict, rigid. But it's a nice house, and I happen to like . . . I wouldn't live in an International Style house, but God, you know, I go back to that first shock when I saw one, and it's something incredibly wonderful about it, so stripped down. You wouldn't have known its bones were so beautiful. [Laughs]
JG: Hmmm. Which one, for example?
EM: Well, Neutra, I think, especially. Those apartment houses of his, and then his house in Palm Springs, too, was very . . .
JG: That is a nice house.
EM: Yes.
JG: That passage of you, when you . . . Where was it, in . . . ?--you walking downstairs in the Lovell house, walking into that light? Was that in the . . . ?
EM: I think that would have been in Vienna to Los Angeles. The last part, I think. The stairways, comparing the stairs of the Schindler and the Neutra. Then I swore never to write about architecture again, but then I did. And then, too, you don't . . . Fiction is something you can't pick up and put down. In fiction you set a scene, and in other writing you inform. You can't move back and forth from one to the other.
Let's see, where am I going, in the 50's? I don't think I can stop. I would have to think about that, to break it down, about what the changes . . . There was a change in the . . . Johnson did some of it. The people that I talked to (I told you this before), in 1964. Oh yes, that's another thing, John Entenza got me a Graham grant. Well, no, it was Ford. I think he helped. He got me a Ford grant to study young architects. And that was '64. And so how could I give it up? I mean, I was just pushed back into it. And being at home with it anyway.
But it was '64 that the effects of Johnson, his softening. That the way he would, you know, he would take a column and sculpture it. And well, so had Niemeyer in Brasilia, that was 1960. But the young architects, none of them approved of him, of Johnson, and yet they were all so careful, because they knew his power and they were really afraid to say anything. Johnson was always very nice to me, whenever we met, and I liked him. God, he made me laugh; no one is funnier than Johnson.
JG: Mmmmmm. When did you meet him?
EM: I met him a number of times, at meetings and in New York. Well, a dozen times, maybe; half dozen times.
JG: Johnson said he really should have written about you?
EM: And you know, this is what I think he was talking about. It was a book that was being re-published. What was it? I've forgotten. This was only a couple of years ago. And I think it was John Dixon who said . . . I said I was looking for someone to . . . The publisher wanted to get someone to say a word about it for the . . . And he said, "I can get Johnson to." And then he called back later and said that he couldn't. Johnson didn't do this. And I thought that might have been what he was talking about. (It's [the tape] not on now, is it?)
JG: It is on now. So it was, that he would have . . . He was talking about what?
EM: Well, he said . . .
JG: Oh, he would have written about the book . . .
EM: He said, "I should have written about you." And then I think he read it after that, maybe. It is quick reading, and I know that several architects have phoned me just after they've read it. I know Cesar called me.
JG: Oh, yes, that was Vienna to Los Angeles.
EM: Yes, yeah.
JG: It was amazing that he had found that. There weren't many printed, were there? Vienna to Los Angeles?
EM: Well, there were a lot printed, and they're still in the warehouse.
JG: In the bin, yes. It's just that it's not as though Johnson goes prowling through the bookstores.
EM: If you want me to give him a copy, I'll . . .
JG: Oh, he has it! He told me he loved it.
EM: Oh, I see. It's his kind of book. Because it's quick, quick.
JG: It's a very good book.
EM: You know, Konrad Wachsmann, too, came to see me as soon as he'd read it. Quincy Jones called me just after he finished it.
JG: This is the book over which you and I met, you recall?
EM: Yes! Yes. And there are a couple of other people who just read it, and, I think, architects who knew the period anyway. But no, you wrote the only really good review.
JG: Aw, gee. [Laughs]
EM: Oh, I couldn't believe it when I read your review. Someone who really reads.
JG: You said the nicest thing, that it was as though I had been looking over your shoulder as you wrote it.
EM: [Laughing] Did I?
JG: Yeah.
EM: [Still laughing] Good for me. [Both laugh]
JG: So, after this self-congratulatory episode, we'll sign off for the next edition.
EM: All right.
[END TAPE 6, SIDE 2]
[BEGIN TAPE 7, SIDE 1]
JG: ... for the Archives of American Art, on Sunday, November 15, in Santa Monica. We are in the late sixties approximately.
EM: The sixties was what I could call the grant period. The first one came in 1964, the Ford grant. It was sort of a reward for having worked so long in the vineyard, I suppose. The Ford grant was to study the work of young architects. Well, tapes of my interviews with them are all at the Smithsonian. I can't name all of them now, but some of the important ones were Charles Moore, Robert Venturi--people who had been in Philip Johnson's office.
JG: Jim Polshek?
EM: Jim Polshek, yes.
JG: Was this the start of your association with some of these people?
EM: Yes. And then in Philadelphia, too, there were a number of people. Tim Vreeland and... What's the name of the Italian?
JG: Oh, I know who you mean.
EM: Aldo Giurgola. And then the Detroit architect, first name begins with a G, the Latvian.
JG: I don't know that one.
EM: Gunnar Birkerts and various people in New York. I think I mentioned those in the office of Philip Johnson.
JG: This gives us an idea, but the whole list is in your file.
EM: Yes, it is. Then, I was going to do a book on the young architects, and Bruno Alfieri was interested in publishing it in Italy. And he even gave me a page make-up, to show to editors. Very bright, nice cover, the first of the ones I'd seen that had horizontal strips of various buildings pasted together. There was no money in it from Alfieri, and I was then writing for Arts and Architecture. David Travers had bought it, and he didn't see the . . . He didn't like the architects. He would do one piece on them, so it was all one article on young architects.
JG: How did you choose them?
EM: Well, I'd had some help, and I'd known the work of a number of them. Peter Blake had given me some names, and Paul Grotz had given me some names, I think, although Paul was not too keen on Venturi or some of the others. I was staying with the Grotzes in New York several days when I was there, and Bob Venturi came to New York and came to see me there. There was no indication that he was going to be an important architect in the reception.
But this is the first time I'd had such full notes and was prepared to write a book that did not come off. The cost of the trips had been very high, and there wasn't too much left from the grant by the time I had got to the point of writing.
JG: Venturi had written his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by that time?
EM: No, he had not. He had published one piece from it. But this was '64, and I think it was '66 that it came out. Anyway, there was another piece of it that I had asked him to let me try to get David Travers to publish. David was not as experimental as John Entenza. He paid more, and he was very easy to work with, and he made more changes in my text than John ever had, or John's office. But I liked David very much, and he was a very fair person. But he just simply did not see this as material for publication. They looked strange to him, and he was so used to the Bauhaus that anything that was the beginning of post-modern was just not for him.
JG: This was a round-up of everybody who became the establishment of the next generation.
EM: Yes, it was. I had done earlier-very early, for the Mademoiselle thing--architects who later became famous. Not that famous. But most of these turned out to be very famous-germinal figures in the seventies. I tried to get David to be more experimental in the things he used in Case Studies. But he had taken a road that was the middle road, and I'd wanted him to use inflatables and, oh, a spin-off from Bucky Fuller and other things. But he did do a number of experimental things--I mean, writers he published. He always alludes to this when we discuss it, that he did do some writers who became famous. Or the things they wrote about became famous.
That was the beginning of a life that was easier, and then by this time my name was known to many young architects. I was sort of an under-the-counter book that the young architects were beginning to find. Five California Architects didn't get too high marks among the historians because there was too much in it that was not the way architectural history was written. I think it was not until Peter Banham came along and brought engineering as a subject for architectural history that it was broadened.
JG: What was it especially about your work that was not suitable or appropriate . . . . ?
EM: Well, I don't know really how to describe it except that it did deal more with their lives, and my feeling that architecture did come out of people, and those people came out of backgrounds, and the things they saw when they were children, things they grew up with, and how these affected their choices, and also their own points of view on things, many things that were not purely architectural.
I think the usual architectural history at the time was written from the point of view of the facade, and there wasn't too great emphasis even on the floor plan. Having worked in an architect's office, knowing the importance of the floor plan as the basis for the creation, I did give it great attention. I already had a great sensitivity to floor plans, and I think now, three or four years after finishing Second Generation, I can still walk the floor plans of almost all the buildings that I wrote about, and would recognize them, I think. At least if the window openings were in, I could recognize them. Harris's especially. I keep walking those at night and know them all. He had a very good floor plan. His was the only one among those that was not really universal space. This was closer to space for use rather than space as simply a great expanse for photography.
There are many reasons for this, I think. Many architects were experimenting with walls and wall systems, as Soriano was, so you can't just say that one was forward looking or made a more livable space. Others were doing experimentation which has really benefitted architecture very much. Soriano, for instance, in developing walls that could be put together in factories, that even had everything in them, the electricity and the phone connections and the bed, desks and the bed head, and the doors already in them.
JG: Konrad Wachsmann was doing something similar too.
EM: Yes, he had. But not in the way that Soriano did. Konrad had never put desks and things of this sort, he never put the wiring in, and in the houses of his . . . I wrote about one of these houses for Mademoiselle.
JG: Soriano?
EM: . . . of Wachsmann's. As I remember. Wachsmann's was a wood system and Soriano's was steel. Experiments in steel became very important as far as the case study houses went because they moved away from wood and they emphasized the pavilion aspect of the house, as Pierre Koenig, Elwood and Soriano did.
JG: Pavilion in the sense of opening to the outside?
EM: Yes. And all on one level, with a minimum of walls. One funny thing I always remember about Soriano's case study, that he still believed the kitchen should be separated, as most Europeans did, from anything else. He has doors a foot apart, one to the service and one to the entrance hail. You open them both and go into the same space. But one was the kitchen, and I think that he believed that. I know Schindler and Neutra both believed in this.
When I was in Schindler's office I tried to take away the separation between the service space and the kitchen, and he always put it back in. I think once he let it stay.
JG: Service space, you mean the washing machine and . . .
EM: Yes, yes. He always believed that the smells from the kitchen should not enter the living space.
JG: Now, who?
EM: Schindler, yes. And Neutra too. It is a place . . . It's something that comes out of the many servants that were possible, servants as a class. And that, at the end of World War II, so many people who'd worked in kitchens left the kitchen and went to work in airplane plants or in factories. So they never went back. So we became a servantless people, certainly in California, until the Mexicans . . . South Americans really now have supplanted it. They've made another group of servants, but not live--in, as they were formerly, which required a house with a servant's room and servants' quarters, in some cases, for big houses.
JG: You think that might come back, that floor plan that reflects the servant class?
EM: Floor plans always reflect the economy.
JG: The economy now has servants. People can now afford servants.
EM: But the floor plan doesn't quite go back. Once it's made a change, it wouldn't revert to the Victorian house with the servants' quarters.
JG: Back stairway . . .
EM: Well, now, say even in the red house, which was an early modern house, you see the servants' spaces there. I think I commented on this some place, the long hall from the kitchen to the dining room. That's both [spelling it out] H-A-L-L and H-A-U-L to the dining room, in the red house. Mary Banham took me there once when I was in England, and I was interested in it and then studied the plan in various other ways.
JG: Whose house is that, the red house?
EM: Well, it was for--oh, the arts and crafts man, Morris. It was for Morris, and it was by, oh God, I know, but--you can look that up. In writing I leave these. If I can't think of a name, I leave that blank, and go on, and then turn my chair around and pull down books from the shelf and fill in the spaces. Or, by that time, I may remember them. Phillip Webb, it was, who designed the house.
JG: Getting back to the young architects that you were studying who became kind of the deans of their generation, how did you select them? You found their works simply interesting, or . . .
EM: I looked at their work. They had very little published, all of them, but I looked at it, and made the selection of the architects from this.
JG: What was emerging as the ideas of that time? Were things more complex or metaphorical or . . . ?
EM: It was a move away from the Bauhaus, mainly.
JG: And these were the people who were doing it.
EM: Yes.
JG: Did you think of it as a radical thing at the time, or was it a curiosity, or did you sense a much larger thing going on?
EM: I saw change coming. Something has continued for a long time, and no real freshness comes out of it. Then, you like change.
Well, I was starting to bring in Mexico, but I find it doesn't . . . I was thinking about Barragan, but his was really such a cross between the European. Well, Corb, it would be, the Mexicans look to Corb. It would be a cross between Corb--in Barragan--a cross between Corb and the village churches. You saw he used this very poor pine they had, and he really made an aesthetic principle out of the poor wood they had in Mexico. That's why they use so much concrete. Concrete became very popular in Mexico because there were so few trees, and the transportation from the forested part of Mexico was not easy. So they used the material, which was concrete, and that's why Felix Candela became so . . . bringing something new to that.
But to go back, to Barragan for instance, he used various elements of the village churches and religious buildings, and the buildings where the religious people lived, and combined those with Corb. It was a Corbusian thing, a regionalism, and done with a skill that was unbelievable.
JG: There was a certain amount of the rancho in there too, wasn't there?
EM: No, not in Barragan. No, no rancho. None, none whatever.
JG: Cancel that.
EM: Yes. In Candela. I wrote a great deal about Candela, because in the fifties there was a shell on every student's drawing board. I wrote about him so much, I think, when he did a small shell for the university campus, a tiny building, for study of rays--Cosmic Ray Pavilion, I think it was called. At the same time he was doing this church which was made concrete. While in Italy (what's the Italian's name?) was using various parts for the concrete elements, in Mexico . . .
JG: Nervi.
EM: Nervi, yes, was using pre-fabricated parts, while in Mexico Felix Candela was applying it directly, and it was in doubly curved surfaces. He could use it that way very thin. And he did the church this way that was really very well known. They looked extremely complicated but as I asked him how he could get the workmen to understand this, such a complicated thing, he said, "It's not complicated; it is simply a surface that is easily--the plane is doubly curved but it is on a grid.
JG: It's the double curvature that gives it strength, isn't it?
EM: Yes, yes, it does. Which I'd understood in working in planes, too--the curves strengthened the 032 sheet metal.
JG: Oh, I see. You said that the concrete work in Italy by Nervi was pre-cast concrete, more than poured?
EM: Yeah, it was pre-cast, you know, in the salt. I don't know if it was true of the salt mines he did, the factory, but it was in the stations and the stadia that he did.
JG: What about the influences of North, across the border, North to South, South to North? Was there much then? Mexico to the United States?
EM: I think the only one that really had the lasting effect was--no, I don't mean lasting, but it was Candela. But it didn't work out in the United States because . . . It did in Mexico because labor cost was very low. In the United States labor cost was extremely high. So . . .
[END OF TAPE 7, SIDE 1]
[BEGIN TAPE 7, SIDE 21
JG: . . . November 15, in Santa Monica, we're talking about Candela, Mexico, concrete.
EM: I've forgotten what I was going to say, but I've written all this; it's been in Arts and Architecture, and I wrote about Candela for various regional magazines, literary magazines like New Mexico Quarterly.
JG: You have copies of this among your papers?
EM: Yes.
JG: To get back to the influence across the border. Why was there not more dialogue, or why has there not been more dialogue between the North and the South?
EM: Well, just that thing, the economics.
JG: The labor.
EM: Yes, labor, and the . . .
JG: But France would influence America through Corb, and Corb would influence Mexico, but for some reason the intellectual influence didn't seem to go back and forth across the borders; it still isn't going across the borders.
EM: Between Mexico and the United States?
JG: Yeah.
EM: No, but I don't think they're doing anything very exciting in Mexico now. This was a high period simply because they had a . . . Presidents can't succeed themselves; they have a six year office. This president was going out of office and so he was having the university built as sort of his monument. That had taken a number of years to start, and so that was part of the thing that kept the ideas alive. Before that, it had been started by the development of the concrete industry in Mexico, which had influenced Juan O'Gorman. He did the schools in International Style for the Department of Education.
JG: In concrete.
EM: Yes. But now, take something like the . . . Oh, where the lava beds are. What's the name of that?
JG: In Mexico City? The community is called . . .
EM: Anyway, it was planned by Barragan, and he invited various people to design houses there. They're all very large. All of them have, I've noticed and said in writing, entry halls larger than the servants' quarters, servants' bedrooms, certainly. This was true by a Communist designer in Brazil, Niemeyer. I saw an apartment of his. But there they were living in . . . They had no air in the apartment; it just came through openings in the room that went out to a hail which had some opening. But they were so small.
JG: The servants' quarters?
EM: Yes. Very, very small. Juan O'Gorman, for instance, he was designing a house, and I was there at the time, staying with them. And I pointed out to him that his entry hail was larger than the servant's room, and here, he was very left wing, and it sort of shocked him, I think. He changed it; he added a little [laughing], a few square feet to the servant's room, but I don't think he cut down too much, because they really required show, in Mexico.
There was nothing like the case study house program which was . . . Space was very hard to come by, expensive, and the people, they had a middle class that had been immensely expanded by the war, which could afford some houses. Mexico--its middle class began to grow with the building of the University, but never to the extent that it did here. And then it pretty well stopped, mainly because of the money that's stolen by the people in power. And I think the oil money, when they discovered oil in Mexico, I think most of that money went out of Mexico; it wasn't used. I think the difference between incomes of the rich and the poor has become greater in Mexico in the last years. The difference in United States between the rich and the poor has become greater under Reagan, but it is still less than in Mexico. One good thing, it keeps crafts, hand crafts alive. The difference between, you know, when there's no lower working class, no hand craft class, the crafts fail. And can be brought back then only by, given new life only by money grants from governments.
. . .
Let's see if there was anything else. Oh yes, I taught. David Gebhard asked me to take his class when he was in Europe. He did a book on Schindler after; I think it came out in 1970, and so this would be the end of the sixties. Yeah, it was, about '69, I think. I went for two quarters, and that was a change, too, because I was paid so much that I could really start a little nest egg for the poor times, so I could get it in some CD's which would help. Because I knew that they would come again; they always did, low periods. And then by this time I wanted to write the things that I liked to write, and that you have to pay for. You buy time. So I bought time.
Let's see, there was a couple of other shows; I don't quite remember what they were. It's in the list there, yes.
JG: And you started teaching, you said, at Santa Barbara. Did you do that frequently or...
EM: I'd begun to lecture quite a bit, before that, but I lectured four classes a week at Santa Barbara..
. . .
I was Regent's Lecturer at U.C. Santa Barbara, 1967. I did a book on Craig Ellwood for Walker in 1968, published in Italy. I did it for Bruno Alfieri, for whom I'd written for Italian magazines.
I had the Star of Order of Solidiarity from the Republic of Italy in 1960, and I was made an Honorary Associate of the Southern California Chapter of American Institute of Architects in 1967, and received the Distinguished Service Citation from the California Council of the A.I.A. in 1968,