Charles Willard Moore

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Piazza d'Italia, New Orleans

Charles Willard Moore (October 31, 1925 in Benton Harbor, Michigan – December 16, 1993 in Austin, Texas) was an American architect, educator, writer, and winner of the AIA Gold Medal in 1991.

[edit] Biography

Moore graduated from the University of Michigan in 1947 and earned both a Masters and Doctorate at Princeton University in 1957, where he stayed for an additional year as a post-Doctoral fellow. During this fellowship, Moore served as teaching assistant for Louis Kahn, the Philadelphia architect who taught a design studio. It was also at Princeton that Moore developed relationships with fellow students Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull, Jr., Richard Peters, and Hugh Hardy, who would remain lifelong friends and collaborators. In 1959, Moore left New Jersey and began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Moore went on to become Dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1965 through 1970, directly after the tenure of Paul Rudolph. In 1975 he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, and finally in 1985 he became the O'Neil Ford Centennial Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

Moore's somewhat Dionysian personality and his dedication to innovation, collaboration, debate and direct experience was sharp contrast to Rudolph's authoritarian approach. With Kent Bloomer, Moore founded the Yale Building Project in 1967 as a way to both demonstrate social responsibility and demystify the construction process for first-year students. The Project is still ongoing.

Moore opened practice in New Haven, Connecticut and in the following years practiced under a confusing variety of configurations and partners and names (including Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull, Whitaker (MLTW), Centerbrook Architects, Moore Ruble Yudell, Urban Innovations Group, and Moore/Andersson) through his extensive worldwide travels and moves to California and then to Austin, Texas.

With his preference for conspicuous design features, loud color combinations, supergraphics, stylistic collisions, the re-use of esoteric historical design solutions, and the use of non-traditional materals like plastic, (aluminized) PET film, platinum tiles, and neon signs, Moore's architecture always provides arousal, demands attention, and sometimes tips over into kitsch. His own mid-1960s New Haven residence, published in Playboy, features an open, freestanding shower in the middle of the room, its water nozzled through a giant sunflower. Such stylistic collisions have encouraged the postmodernists to retroactively adopt Moore as one of their own. The true philosophic link between the two is questionable.

In addition to his influential work as an architect and university educator, Moore was also one of the most prolific authors in American architectural history. In addition to the dozen books that he authored, many other books and monographs document his work.

The Place of Houses (with Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon)
Dimensions (with Gerald Allen)
Body, Memory and Architecture (with Kent Bloomer)
The Poetics of Gardens
The City Observed: Los Angeles (with Peter Becker and Regula Campbell)
Water and Architecture
Chambers for a Memory Palace (with Donlyn Lyndon)

"Body, Memory, and Architecture," written with Kent Bloomer during the Yale years, is a plea for architects to design structures for three-dimensional user experience instead of two-dimensional visual appearance. "The City Observed: Los Angeles" remains an excellent guide to Los Angeles' significant architecture.

The Charles W. Moore Foundation was established in 1997 in Austin, Texas to preserve Moore's last home and studio. Its non-profit programs include residencies, conferences, lectures, and publication of PLACENOTES, a travel guide.