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Ester McCoy | 16

houses I worked on in the 40s). And closer at hand were the paired beams at six-eight, concealing the lighting and supporting the overhang above the sliding doors. The system was based on use, necessity, the building code.

The drafting boards were low, and we sat on plywood chairs of Schindler's design rather than stools, and as I swung around before answering the telephone, which so seldom rang it always startled me, I usually tipped over the chair. To see one of his fine structivist chairs tipped over wounded him; it was as if I had contradicted one of his sacred beliefs. I tried to soften the slur by saying it was not the chair, it was my latent obedience brought into play by the ringing of the telephone; his was an elitist approach to the telephone, summed up in his statements, "A telephone is for my convenience not the callers."

At the typewriter table, very rarely used, was another such chair, built up from a platform with a single plywood support from front to back, and two small plywood flying buttresses. He sorted the mail at the chair, always leaving letters from editors for me to dispose of--answer or file. One day I found his photographic file and saw that there were only three or four photographs of the houses of the early 40s--not enough to make a complete presentation. I begged him to have additional photographs made of these, and of the two or three finished after I came into the office.

He resisted this, or, rather, he asserted that his houses