Asked about Banham’s Four Ecologies, I mused over the curious nexus between his comment that Rudolf Schindler “mastered the local idiom of stucco over wood framing” and my recollections of rainwater gushing into my Schindler remodel (stucco over wood framing) in Silverlake for two successive winters in the 1980s. You have to get up close and personal to see such things—something he did not do. His breezy ramble through mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles makes for a great read—great from afar, far from great.