Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1970s
and the M.C.A.C. award from Los Angeles County Museum of Art for distinguished achievement in 1982, and an A.I.A. Honor Award for Excellence in 1985, the Julia Morgan award from UCLA in 1987, and the--what's that last one?
JG: Oh, the A.I.A. . . .
EM: No, from the Woman's Building.
JG: Oh, the Vesta . . .
EM: . . .Vesta Award in 1987, for scholarship. I think that takes care of [it]. In 1969 I became a contributor to Progressive Architecture, and for a while did a monthly story for them, and then after that just contributed stories. That is the Craig Ellwood book [she is looking through papers], and that sort of finishes up the sixties. The Ten Italian Architects was 1967.
Then, in the seventies, I had other awards. I had a Graham in 1971. That was to pull together certain things from writings . . . Some of the work was on J.R. Davidson, and on Ain, and on various other people--to pull together papers that I had which led to writing, in the seventies, of Second Generation. The Guggenheim, also, was in 1979. That was what I used to write and do the traveling and expenses and everything on Second Generation.
I did about maybe, in all, over the years, forty pieces for Progressive Architecture, and for endless other magazines. I contributed to catalogues. One was on Naives and Visionaries, a show at the Walker Art Center, and I wrote on Bottle Village [Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village, Simi Valley, CA] near Los Angeles. It was folk art, folk architecture. Then, also, I wrote another thing on the Eames, for Walker Art, on their work. It was the work of the (what's the name of the thing they work for?) the Herman Miller . . . It was a show; I did the Eames section.
Then I began researching on the Vienna to Los Angeles book. I had done stories, or I had put together the letters between Neutra and Schindler for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. And then also the letters from Louis Sullivan to Schindler. That also was published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. So, in this book, Vienna to Los Angeles, about Neutra and Schindler, those letters are in the back of the book. It's a story of how both of them got to the United States and their friendship, and the break-up of their friendship, and their work together in King's Road, when Neutra moved into the house. It was a small book, very compact, and was liked mainly by architects. I don't know many other people who knew it. It didn't have wide distribution. It's, I think really, one of my favorite books, because it was so taut. I think it was so taut that I really wanted to loosen up, and so the next book was Second Generation, which just spilled out and carried the architects into various phases of their life and their development, far more fully than I did in Five California Architects, and with less reason to have that length.
In 1974 I had some surgery. I had an ulcer that had recurred a number of times, was very painful, and finally I had surgery for it. While I was getting over it, I set up a typewriter by the table downstairs. My workroom's been upstairs. I just began writing about my life, mainly from the time I went to New York, and first worked in New York, Patchin Place, and work for Dreiser, and several of those pieces have been published--or two have been published now and one will be out next month in Grand Street. That has been work that I've liked very much. I have written several other parts of this, that are unpublished, and one about the radical movement in Los Angeles. That is unpublished. Then a piece on Schindler which has just been published in L.A. Architect, about my work in the office, his way of working. Oh, yeah, after that I did a small piece on Robert Venturi, of meeting him and seeing his house for the first time, reminiscence, really.