The most comprehensive volume on one of the most innovative architects of the 20th-century. Contains many never-published drawings & photographs. -- Tie-in with Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Maverick of mid-century American architecture "Each of my buildings deal with a different architectural problem, the existence of which has been forgotten in this period of Rational Mechanization. The question of whether a house is really a house is more important to me, than the fact that it is made of steel, glass, putty or hot air." - R. M. Schindler Hailing from Vienna, Rudolph Michael Schindler (1887-1953), like his colleague Richard Neutra, emigrated to the US and applied his International Style techniques to the movement that would come to be known as California Modernism. Influenced by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and taking cues from spatial notions found in cubism, he developed a singular style characterized by geometrical shapes, bold lines, and association of materials such as wood and concrete, as seen in his own Hollywood home (built in 1921-22) and the house he designed for P.M. Lovell in Newport Beach (1923-24). About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Architecture Series features: an introduction to the life and work of the architect the major works in chronological order information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts and plans)

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by Susan Morgan, presents an unprecedented selection of McCoy’s work—innovative articles, out-of-print essays, unpublished lectures, and personal memoir—and roundly recognizes this brilliant American original, the pre-eminent voice of West Coast modernism.

"The five architects - Bernard Maybeck, Irving Gill, the brothers Charles and Henry Greene, and R.M. Schindler - whose work and lives are presented here were seminal figures in American architecture. As Californians they were less influenced than their Eastern contemporaries by the European styles that prevailed in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, and each of them devised an original style that has had a profound effect on younger generations of American architects."--The inside cover

This first monograph on Schindler House features specially commissioned color images of the twentieth-century architectural masterpiece. Tie-in with Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.