Charles Willard Moore

UXL Newsmakers, (2005)

Charles Willard Moore

American postmodern architect and educator Charles Willard Moore (1925-1993) is noted for his eclectic range of historicist buildings, each of which represents a unique response to the context of its site and culture—whether in the form of vernacular shed-roof wooden houses, Palladian-inspired stuccoed villas, or Federal-style college buildings. All are done as serious comments on current architectural theory and at the same time evoking a sense of gaiety or irony.

Charles Willard Moore was born in 1925 in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Throughout much of his grade school and high school years his parents traveled during the winter months from their home in Michigan either to Florida or California, spending several weeks in such cities as St. Petersburg and Hollywood. As a result of these extensive cross-country travels, Moore gained an inherent understanding of the American city and a rich knowledge of the history of American architecture.

Moore's university training was divided between his undergraduate years at the University of Michigan, where he entered at 16 and received a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1947; and Princeton University, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1956 and a Ph.D. in architecture in 1957. At Princeton he studied with Ecoletrained Jean Labatut, the Milanese architect Enrico Peressutti, and American architect Louis Kahn. Throughout this period of Moore's education and early professional career he shunned the purity of the prevailing International Style and focused instead on an architecture that was both historicist and contextual. Likewise, he did not subscribe to the Modernist approach to urban redevelopment which called for wholesale clearance, but rather sought to work within the existing context or urban fabric and to enhance its essential character. His doctoral dissertation, "Water in Architecture," represented another of his consuming interests, the role of fountains and water in public space, an all-encompassing study that traced the history of fountains from Europe and the United States to China and Japan.

After two years of teaching at Princeton in the late 1950s, Moore moved to California to take a teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley. He became chair of the program in 1962. Shortly afterward he designed for himself a house in Orinda, California, which brought him early acclaim because of its evocation of a vernacular tradition and its unique articulation of interior space. In 1963 he formed a partnership with Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull, and Richard Whitaker. Their wooden shed-roof designs for the Sea Ranch Condominiums on the coast north of San Francisco brought recognition and feature stories in the leading architectural magazines. A vacation resort built along a ten-mile stretch of the Pacific coast, Sea Ranch garnered acclaim for its pitched-roof, redwood-clad houses set into dramatic cliffsides. The development became a prototype for many suburban communities across the country. Other significant buildings produced by the Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull, and Whitaker partnership include Kresge College of the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Faculty Club of the University of California at Santa Barbara, both of which are informal stucco-clad compositions with irregular plans and picturesque profiles.

In 1965 Moore was appointed chair of the Department of Architecture at Yale University, a position he held until 1969. Upon moving to the East Coast he established a new partnership in Essex, Connecticut, with William Grover and Robert Harper. Projects of the firm include an addition to the Williams College Art Museum and the Hood Museum at Dartmouth University. The Williams College project, completed in 1983, required an addition to a significant 1840s octagonal Federal-style building that once served as the college library. Located on a steeply sloping angular site at the back of the original building, the new structure is built around a triangular court with a cascading stairway that provides a new entrance to the museum and a link to the new galleries. In a similar manner, the Hood Museum at Dartmouth presented Moore with the problem of joining new gallery space to already existing buildings, one Modern, the other Romanesque. Here he linked the two buildings with a connecting corridor and a concrete and brick gateway that gives access to an entrance courtyard. Inside, the building features a polygonal vestibule and a high main gallery with an exaggerated overhead bridge truss and clerestory windows.

Other buildings from this period include Whitman Village in Huntington, New York, and the Jones Laboratory and Sammis Hall at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. As with all of Moore's buildings, they do not represent any single style or dogma, but rather are the result of Moore's response to their setting, their cultural context, and their individual clients. They tend to be playful, full of drama and surprise, expressing cultural aspirations and translating architectural precedents into something new and relevant to the present age.