“Los Angeles spawns strange styles,” wrote writer and architectural historian Esther McCoy: Bungalows, Googie, John Lautner, Cesar Pelli, and Frank Gehry, for starters. This is one of the many insights she captured while working from her own Santa Monica, Calif., bungalow, as she documented American Modernism’s West Coast roots in her now-classic book Five California Architects (1960), and for such publications as Arts & Architecture and the Los Angeles Times. Sixty-eight essays and memoir pieces make up Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader, the first anthology of her work. • $34.95; East of Borneo Books, May 2012
Book: ‘Piecing Together Los Angeles’
