Viewing page 26 of 26

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Esther McCoy  3

[[the following paragraph is marked "out" in the margin]]

I drew many unnecessary cross sections and details of the house I was designing. It had an L plan like one by Harwell Harris in Santa Monica Canyon, and I banked the windows like Neutra. The plan could easily have been squeezed into three pages but I stretched them out to six, mainly because I wanted to keep the drawing close to me, hoping that the pencil under my hand would teach me something more than how a wall meets a roof or foundation. I was hoping that if I listened carefully I would get a clue to why one building was wonderful and another ordinary. But the pencil yielded no secrets.

What [[strikethrough]] Pauline Schindler [[/strikethrough]] ^[[she]] said about the Kings Road house was poetic, but to someone who had worked so lately with [[strikethrough]] a [[/strikethrough]] .032 Alclad at Douglas and was concerned with weight and how things were put together, it was a closed world. Sitting in the Kings Road house, following the transfer of loads from member to member, the transition from low roof to high roof, I tried to guess how it was done. I tried to guess why it was done. I even tried to guess how it would be drawn. 

[[line]]

I gave up questioning Pauline because the kinds of questions I asked brought assurances that structure was not the route to an appreciation of Schindler. The books in my library on modern architecture gave me no clue to Schindler. I had come to understand something about Neutra and Harris, and in New York I had sat half a dozen times in the brownstone remodeled by William Lescaze--indeed I had postponed withdrawing from a committee investigating the wages of women laundry workers