Piecing Together Los Angeles

Book excerpt: This fall, East of Borneo will publish the first anthology of Esther McCoy’s landmark writing about Southern California. Esther McCoy (1904-1989) was a keen literary stylist and an ingenious architectural historian who chronicled mid-century modernist design as it was being created. Her 1960 book Five California Architects has long been acknowledged as an indispensable classic. As Reyner Banham observed: “No one can write about architecture in California without acknowledging her as the mother of us all." Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader (Fall 2011), edited and with an introduction by Susan Morgan, presents an unprecedented selection of McCoy’s work—innovative articles, out-of-print essays, unpublished lectures, and personal memoir—and roundly recognizes this brilliant American original, the pre-eminent voice of West Coast modernism.