Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1945, 1940s
EM: Just after the war, mainly. Because even after the war there were restrictions on the type of building you could do--the square footage and what materials you could use.
JG: It was very small, wasn't it?
EM: Yes.
JG: The houses . . .
EM: Yes. And that's why in the case-study houses, they were two bedroom houses. But then, too, another reason for this was that the families during the Depression were much smaller. Two was a fairly large family during the Depression. After the war, when small houses were planned . . . You see, even before the Depression, there were not many small houses built. What you did was just to take an old big one and make do with it. Very little work had been done, experimenting with the small house. I think in England they had, and various other places, but not in the United States. So that's why the case-study house program was important-to get good designs for two-bedroom houses. An innovation was that they all had two baths, which was good.
Now, where am I?
JG: About houses. At the time, did the floor plan reflect any change in, sort of the sociology of . . .
EM: Yes, yes, they did. Take Davidson's first case study. It had no halls, and it had the . . .
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JG: This is Joseph Giovannini interviewing Esther [McCoy] for the Archives of American Art on Saturday, November 14th, in Santa Monica. We're continuing, Esther. We were talking about the floor plan?
EM: Yes. That was a hall-less floor plan, on the Davidson's case study in Brentwood. I'd almost have to show you the floor plan to show you how it worked, but the . . .
JG: What did it reflect about the family? There weren't servants?
EM: Yes. Also, there was a division, another new thing was, between the two bedrooms. There was space. They weren't banked together. Schindler had done that; he did that in the Pressburger house, which was the first one of his that I worked on. I guess that was about '44, and the master bedroom was separated from the children's wing. He may have started that; I don't know. But Wright had really established the open plan. It had come from others before him, but Wright was the one who gave it authority and gave it architectural significance.
JG: That was true of Wright in a lot of things. He was very derivative; there might have been a Leif Ericson who discovered America first but Columbus was the one who made the significant discovery.
EM: Yes. So, what shall I say now.
JG: We were back in about '46 or '47. You were talking about the two-bedroom houses, two bathrooms.
EM: The case-study house program was initiated in 1945. Many people have asked since then why was not Schindler invited to do one. There was a great distinction between the postwar architects and the pre-war architects. Most of the prewar architects were not invited, the ones who were important. First of all, it was a program that was planned to be short-lived, but it was so successful that it went on and on. It was not only the case-study house, there were all sorts of houses that were built as model houses, and they were constantly visited. They were very popular, some on Wilshire Boulevard. One was Neutra's plywood house.
JG: In Brentwood?
EM: Yes, it was moved to Brentwood, but it was first a model house and was moved there. It was bought by John Entenza's father's law partner, whose name was . . . I've forgotten her first name, but her last name was Gramer. She bought it and moved it to the Brentwood location, where it now still is. Any place you'd drive, there would be some model house, flags out, "open to the public," and you could see it. They were mainly ranch houses, or colonials, or salt boxes, anything, but this was the only case studies that were modern. Another thing, too, they had all modern furnishings and modern kitchens, and the landscaping was done by good modern landscape architects.
JG: Was this the only place in the country where this sort of modern case-study house was . . .
EM: Yes, yes it was.
JG: Neutra had been asked by Levitt to study Levittown, but I guess that was a little bit later.
EM: That was later, yes.
JG: That Levitt decided against doing the modern . . .
Can you place a little bit the importance of modernism, the presence of modernism in Southern California and its importance for the modern movement?
EM: Well, it was late coming. It was strong, but it was late, and most of the architects . . . First let me finish why Neutra, why Schindler was not asked and others . . . The case-study house program started as a short-lived thing, and some of John Entenza's friends and Charles Eames's friends from . . . Where did he go to school?
JG: Oh, Cranbrook.
EM: Cranbrook were invited in. Those are the younger, Eero Saarinen, and others. But after this group, the only older ones . . . There were older ones, Davidson and Wurster. And it was, not Honnold & Rex, but, well, Rex was the one of that partnership who designed the house. Most of the houses that were case-studies, after these first six or eight, were ones that were in the works. The architect came to John, and told him, you know, that they had a house, and it looked good, and so then they worked it out to see whether it was going to fit. It usually did.
Some of them were not all that good, the case studies. I wanted to take them out, when I did the book on the case studies, but the editor wanted them all in. That's why, if Ain had had a house, and had gone to John, he would have done it, put it in the case-study house program.
But after a while it was the younger ones, and that was a very important thing. It was why the magazine became so important, because all the post-war architects wanted to be published in it. It was a sign of having arrived to have something in Arts and Architecture.
While I was working for Schindler I did . . . Schindler, like so many of the other older architects, was rather contemptuous of John Entenza. They looked upon him as a Johnny-come-lately. And since John was more oriented to Europe, and Schindler by this time had cut himself off from Europe, he was rather cool to John. And many things, you know, I would take of Schindler's. Call John and ask him to publish things of Schindler's as they were photographed, and Schindler was always critical about the way the stories were handled. They were not too happy with John, the older architects, and they felt he was too much toward Europe and not enough toward Wright and the modern, the native. What is it now I wanted to get back to?