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.

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 buildings, Moore left a legacy as teacher, collaborator, and writer. "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.

Work

• The influential 1965 Sea Ranch Condominium Project in Sonoma County, California, (with landscape architect Lawrence Halprin)
• The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley
• Kresge College at University of California Santa Cruz
• The Beverly Hills Civic Center in Beverly Hills, California
• University Extension at the University of California, Irvine
• The 1978 small public plaza Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans, Louisiana, and
• His last work, the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, Washington

External links

• Moore Center
• The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley
• The Yale Building Project
• description of Moore's legendary Austin house and studio
• on the successful restoration of Moore's Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans
• Illustrated appreciation of the Piazza d'Italia

1925 births | 1993 deaths | American architects | Charles Willard Moore | Charles Moore