Charles Moore Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Charles Willard Moore (1925-1993) was an American architect, educator and writer and one of the most influential figures in the move away from orthodox modernism. With his partners at MLTW he designed Condominium One at The Sea Ranch in California, and his later works, including Kresge College in Santa Cruz and the Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, combined humour, history and a deep interest in how people experience place. He received the AIA Gold Medal in 1991.

Michigan and Princeton

Moore was born in Benton Harbor, Michigan, in 1925 and studied architecture at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1947. After travelling widely and serving in the Korean War, he studied at Princeton, where he completed a doctorate in 1957 under Jean Labatut and worked as a teaching assistant to Louis Kahn.

MLTW and The Sea Ranch

In 1962 Moore founded the partnership Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker (MLTW) in California and built his own house in Orinda, a small pavilion with two aedicules under a pyramidal roof. Condominium One at The Sea Ranch (1965), on the Sonoma coast, with its timber volumes and shed roofs shaped by the wind, became a model for regionally rooted architecture.

Teaching at Yale and Kresge College

From 1965 to 1970 Moore was chair and then dean of the Yale School of Architecture, where his student-built projects and openness to popular culture shaped a generation. His later teaching took him to UCLA and the University of Texas at Austin. Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1974), a village-like street of buildings among redwoods, showed his interest in community and stage-set architecture.

Piazza d’Italia and late work

The Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans (1978), a colourful, neon-lit collage of classical orders built for the city’s Italian community, became one of the icons of postmodernism. Moore’s later works include the Tegel Harbour housing in Berlin and the Beverly Hills Civic Center. He wrote widely, including The Place of Houses and Body, Memory, and Architecture, and died in Austin in 1993.