In Conversation with David Travers, Editor of Arts & Architecture

David Travers was the last editor of Arts & Architecture. For five years, he combined the magazine’s postwar avant-garde content with the urban sensibilities of the 1960s, kept the Case Study House program alive, and initiated a new phase of it in the form of the Case Study Apartments. However, unlike his predecessor, John Entenza, Travers is typically overlooked in the literature on this major modernist undertaking. To rectify the historiographical omission, this essay explores Travers’s legacy through an edited, excerpted transcription of a conversation that took place in 2013. This interview provides a nugget of primary source material and offers new information about the architectural publishing industry and the goals and vision of one the most influential magazines of the mid-twentieth century.