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Esther McCoy                               11

address book.  As I was going to sleep another thing struck me; the telephone had not rung once.
     The pain over the missing dimensions blots out the name of the client, and I have gone over the list of Schindler's projects of the period without recognizing the name.  I can still see the [[strikethrough]] tho [[/strikethrough]] roughly rectangular plan from which projected a living room with the corners chopped off, but the two unimportant things may have more to say about Schindler.  He simplified everything, from the filing system based on vowels, storage of nuts and bolts, and an address book filled mainly with the names of plumbers and electricians and carpenters.  He had simplified his life.  He had simplified his design and made it more complex.
     I recalled this several times later, once when I asked Felix Candela, who designed thin shells in Mexico (his Cosmic Ray pavilion was 5/8 inch thick), how unskilled labor could follow the complex plans for doubly-curved surfaces.  He answered, "They aren't complex. I just take a grid and warp it."  Many years later John Caldwell told me that on his first day at John Lautner's office Lautner pulled a finger across a plan and said, "I want a section through here."  Caldwell was stumped.  "There were so many changes in the surface of the shell roof that I was sure I could never do it."   But as he continued to study it he saw that the irregular warped surface was simply a cone intersected by a vault.  All the students and young architects who came to work in the Schindler office while I was there were stumped when