Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design

Susan Morgan and Kimberli Meyer

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition at the MAK Center L.A. at the Schindler House that presents the life and work of Esther McCoy, and is the first to focus on McCoy’s activities affirming her unassailable role as a key figure in American modernism.

This catalogue also features a special ‘book within a book’, a supplement chronicling the demise of the Dodge House through letters, documents, and newspaper clippings from the Esther McCoy Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Esther McCoy moved to Los Angeles in 1932 and wrote for literary journals, popular magazines, and progressive broadsheets. By 1945, McCoy’s attentive writing had turned significantly to architecture and for the next 40 years her work articulated the concepts and vibrant character of West Coast modernism.

Her writing regularly appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Arts & Architecture, Zodiac and Architectural Forum. In 1960, McCoy published Five California Architects, her groundbreaking book that remains a seminal volume on California architecture.