Charles Moore

Charles Moore studied at University of Michigan and Princeton University School of Architecture. The recorded working language is English. Places of work recorded in the authority are Tegel. Residence is recorded at Austin. Employment is recorded with University of California, Los Angeles, University of Texas at Austin and University of California, Berkeley. Works named in the authority record are Hood Museum of Art, Signia by Hilton San Jose, Lurie Tower, Piazza d'Italia and Beverly Hills Civic Center. Work by Charles Moore is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, Rome Prize, AIA Gold Medal and Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

• Name — Charles Willard Moore • Born — 31 October 1925 • Birthplace — Benton Harbor, Michigan • Died — 16 December 1993 • Place of death — Austin, Texas • Education — University of Michigan (BArch '47) Princeton University (MFA '56, PhD '57) • Practice — Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull & Whittaker, San Francisco • Significant Buildings — Piazza D'Italia Haas School • Significant Projects — Sea Ranch, California Yale Building Project Kresge College, UC Santa Cruz • Awards — AIA Gold Medal (1991)

Moore graduated from the University of Michigan in 1947, where he was one of the top students in his class. After graduating, he worked for several years as an architect, served in the Army, and studied with Professor Jean Labatut at Princeton University, where he earned a master's degree and a PhD (1957). He remained for an additional year as a post-doctoral fellow, and as a teaching assistant to the architect Louis Kahn, who was teaching a design studio. While at Princeton, he met and befriended the architect Robert Venturi. While at Princeton, Moore developed relationships with fellow students Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull Jr., Richard Peters, and Hugh Hardy. All remained lifelong friends and adherents to a view of architecture as a joyful, humanistic, pursuit that promised to make people happier and healthier. During his Princeton years, Moore designed and built a house for his mother in Pebble Beach, California, and worked during the summers for architect Wallace Holm of neighboring Monterey. Moore's Master's thesis explored ways to preserve and integrate Monterey's historic adobe dwellings into the fabric of the city. His Doctoral dissertation, "Water and Architecture", was a study of the importance of water in shaping the experience of place. The dissertation is significant for being one of the first pieces of architectural scholarship to draw from the work of Gaston Bachelard. Moore used some of the material in his later book, The Poetics of Gardens.

In 1959, Moore left Princeton to take a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley. There he teamed with Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull Jr. and Richard Whittaker to form a new and influential firm: MLTW. They were among the first American architects to favor contextual designs—fitting well with the urban fabric of San Francisco—over harsh Modernist buildings that were alien to the texture of the city. When hired to design an innovative, environmentally sensitive condominium complex on the north coast, they applied some of their sensitivity to "place" to the project. Sea Ranch became one of the most admired, influential, and beloved works of the late twentieth century. Moore rose to become chairman and professor of architecture at Berkeley in five years. His work was featured in the seminal "Forty Under Forty" exhibition at New York's Architectural League that established the "Whites and the Grays" as competing camps of avant garde designers. Curated by Robert A.M. Stern, the show eventually became a book in 1969. When Paul Rudolph resigned as Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, a nationwide search finally settled on Moore as his successor in 1965. As Stern observed in his history of the school, Moore was an energetic though often controversial leader who managed to steer the program through some of its most tumultuous, but also creative years. He served in that capacity for five years, leaving in 1970. With Kent Bloomer, Moore founded the Yale Building Project in 1967 as a way both to demonstrate social responsibility and demystify the construction process for first-year students. He also pushed Yale president Kingman Brewster to hold a competition for a new mathematics building on the historic campus. The results of the contest were divisive, since Moore was seen as a champion of the winning architect, Robert Venturi. Many of Moore's students became leading architects of the next generation, including Mark Simon, Buzz Yudell, Gerald Allen, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Andrés Duany, David Sellers, and Turner Brooks. An innovator in practice who often held design "charettes" to gain insights from clients, Moore also pioneered multi-partner, "suitcase" firms with his former students: Centerbrook Architects (Connecticut), Moore Ruble Yudell (Los Angeles) and Moore/Andersson (Austin, Texas). The constant changes resulted, in part, from Moore's extensive worldwide travel and his moves to California and then to Austin, Texas. • Illustration — Piazza d'Italia, New Orleans While at Yale Moore wrote a useful residential design book: The Place of Houses. Clients and designers loved its easy going style and beautiful drawings, but especially its commitment to "placemaking." With Donlyn Lyndon, Moore also founded the journal Places in Berkeley to expound ideas about the genius loci. He continued to write essays and books for the remainder of his career, including the influential "You Have To Pay for the Public Life," in Perspecta, one of the first predictors of suburban sprawl and the rise of the theme park in America. In 1975, Moore moved to the University of California, Los Angeles where he continued teaching. Finally, in 1985, he became the O'Neil Ford Centennial Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. He died at home of a heart attack on December 16, 1993. One of his last books, Body, Memory and Architecture, not only introduced new psychological and anthropological ideas into design theory, it also anticipated today's revolution in neuroscience, and the theory of "embodied cognition."

• Illustration — The Main Campus of National Dong Hwa University (1992) • Illustration — The Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Moore died before the project was completed in 1995. • The influential Sea Ranch (1963) planned community in Sonoma County, California (with landscape architect Lawrence Halprin) • Mutual Savings Bank Building, San Francisco, California (1964) • The Seaside Professional Building (1959–60), in Seaside, California, was his first commercial building (1959–60), occupied by Monterey County Weekly since 1991. • The Faculty Club at University of California, Santa Barbara, (1968) with William Turnbull • Kresge College (1971) at University of California, Santa Cruz • Leland Burns House, Pacific Palisades, (1973) (House noted for having a pipe organ in the living room) • The postmodern archetype Piazza d'Italia (1978), an urban public plaza in New Orleans, Louisiana • David Rodes House, Brentwood, California (1980) (featured in Life Magazine, December 1980) • The Presence of the Past, architectural facade in Venice Biennale exhibition (1980) • University Extension at the University of California, Irvine • Oceanside Public Library and Oceanside Civic Center in Oceanside, California (1989) • Cedar Rapids Museum of Art (1989) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa • Pleasant Hill City Hall (1991) in Pleasant Hill, California • The Beverly Hills Civic Center (1992) in Beverly Hills, California • National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan (1992) • Gethsemane Episcopal Cathedral, Fargo, North Dakota (1992) • The California Center for the Arts, Escondido in Escondido, California (1993) • The Haas School of Business (1995) at the University of California, Berkeley • Lurie Tower at the University of Michigan (1995) • The Preview Center (became a Bank of America branch) in Celebration, Florida (1996) • The Williams College Museum of Art addition in Williamstown, Massachusetts • The Krishnamurti Center, Ojai, California • His last work, the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, Washington