"Magazines treating art movements seriously are rarely financial successes; most of them fail early or are kept hanging to life by individual benefactors or grants, but the history of art in the united States in the Twentieth Century can be read in the brilliant failures. The debt owed to these magazines is out of proportion to the length of their survival or the number of their subscribers. The fact that Arts and Architecture has a place in the influential list is due to the tenacious spirit of its editor and publisher John Entenza - and to an inheritance he stretched to cover the deficit.

Although he had not studied architecture, he became intensely aware of it when young, acquiring a broad knowledge of the modern movement especially, and developed a sensitivity to form. He could easily have truned designer himself except for a modesty about his own talent that was quickened by his easy recognition of talent in others. This ability served him well for thirty seven years as editor of Arts and Architecture and later as director for the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, he was a bridge between the creative person and the act.

Throughout the years I knew him he always found the right places to live, ones that favored his height and enhanced his dignity. In 1932 it was a Santa Monica cottage filled with brown and green chairs and heavy walnut furniture from his mother's house. In 1940 it was an International Style house by Harwell Hamilton Harris in Santa Monica canyon, so unlike Harris so suited to John; then the Eames-Saarinen Case Study (#9, 1945-49) so heavy boned compared to the whippet-lean Case Study (#8 1945-49) across the meadow by Eames. Then the Neutra apartments on Strathmore, out of the golden age of the International Style, followed by the Mies apartment in Chicago, and finally after his stroke, a Mediterranean-style retirement home on the bay in La Jolla.

All of them had something of John's long thin nose as it sniffed out pretentiousness, and of his carefully brushed hair and dark suit. His shoes and his mind were always nicely polished. Forever urban, no-one was ever less seduced by the California sun - He never exercised; he had no active or spectator sport. He was at home with two or three people around his table pouring good coffee from a Chemex into thin white cups. He liked comfort and good talk. At age sixty-four he phoned me from Chicago to ask if I knew of any good down filled chairs - the kind which would have been shoved out of camera range in the photographs of the Case Studies. At parties he never moved into a group; the group moved to him. He loved gossip but never reached for it; it was given."

Esther McCoy on John Entenza - Blueprints for Modern Living : History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses edited by Elizabeth A. T. Smith p15.