Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1965
I was asked to be . . . I think my title at UCLA . . . I think I went in about 1965. It was before the school opened. George Dudley was the dean.
JG: Before the architecture school opened?
EM: Yes. There were many things that I did there. In fact I was plugged into most every place. Denise Scott Brown was there, who later married Bob Venturi, and we got on very well together. I helped her in the development of her lectures, and because I knew Ocean Park, and her seminars were on a group of buildings in Ocean Park, in planning. She was a planner. So I liked it very much.
George, then, finally gave me a thing to do which was to develop, in the Neutra collection, a way of displaying certain things without they're having to be touched, because Neutra's drawings were old, fragile, and they'd had them for about ten years and had never unrolled any of them. So I discovered this, and that was the first thing I set out to do.
The students were paid, oh, you know, two-fifty, whatever the going wage was then, to help, and there was always one in the office, one in the Neutra collection with me. He turned out to be someone who was working part-time in the computer. So I asked him how it could be done, you know, how it could be computerized? I'd already investigated the things on campus, the way they kept their buildings, and found that they had them on microfiche, and had to have them in drawers. The drawings themselves were in dead storage.
Then I went to Sears, to see how they--because they have a great system, you know, where they just throw something on a screen when you order something. These were very interesting systems, and so I decided on the Neutra it should be a combination of the punch card, with a hole in it that had a little microfiche--a small, small microfiche of the drawing. So we were doing that, and that went on for, I don't know, six or eight months. It was dusty, hard work, and it was fun. But I never had any satisfaction of seeing it carried out, because when the dean changed, the new dean called me in and asked me what I did. And I did so many things, that it was hard to say, so I stumbled around.
JG: That was Perloff?
EM: Perloff, yes. And so he could see that I was of no help, and he knew nothing about architecture, Perloff . . .
JG: He was a planner.
EM: He wasn't even a planner. He raised money in Washington. An economist, I think he was. We'd had a little run-in because I'd wanted the school to buy the Dodge House. It had about four acres, and it was about $900,000. I thought they could raise the money for this, and they could sell off part of it, and you know, in West Hollywood, what three or four acres would go for now. But he said, "No, if I were going to do something like this, I would want something that the kids, the students, could tear down and put together again." And then the Dodge house, of course, was one of the great houses that we had tried so desperately to save.
JG: Was that the first major historic preservation issue in the city?
EM: No, there had been others. There had been others.
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. . . You really could not get great interest in preservation then. I had gotten some money from a small grant from Edgar Kaufman to do a film on the Dodge House, as . . . Because it was so tight, one didn't know. So I worked on that; that was one of those losers too. The film is still around. A copy of it, I think, is at the Smithsonian. That went a number of places, was shown widely. It opened at the County Museum.
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