top of page
unmarboasiokey

The Place Of Houses Charles Moore: Lessons from Edgartown, Santa Barbara, and Sea Ranch



With a new epilogue Richly illustrated with houses large and small, old and new, with photographs, plans, and cutaway drawings, this is a book for people who want a house but who may not know what they really need, or what they have a right to expect. The authors establish the basis for good building by examining houses in the small Massachusetts town of Edgartown; in Santa Barbara, California, where a commitment was made to re-create an imaginary Spanish past; and in Sea Ranch, on the northern California coast, where the authors attempt to create a community. These examples demonstrate how individual houses can express the care, energies, and dreams of the people who live in them, and can contribute to a larger sense of place.


Think about the places you have seen or read about that linger in your memory. For me, a few of them are a glimpse of a garden with a trickling fountain through a gate in Charleston, SC, the two-story library at Biltmore House with its massive fireplace, terraces where Fred and Ginger danced, and the screened porch at the Buckhorn Inn in the Great Smoky Mountains of my home state of Tennessee.




The Place Of Houses Charles Moorel




With the field of architecture at a dynamic but fumbling stage, groping its way into a new era, Dr. Moore best represents one key thrust among postmodernists: The importance of a building's design lies in what it means to the people who inhabit it, and it should give them a fresh sense of place and tradition made new.


Moore has not become a household name in the past 20 years, although Richard Harris, dean of the architecture school at the University of Southern California , places him at the head of a major architectural trend toward people-centered buildings and a ''delightful connection with the past.''


In the new civic center, he adds, Moore may have resolved some of the flaws critics found in his most controversial work to date, the Piazza d'Italia fountain in New Orleans. Designed with the local Italian community in mind, this outdoor gathering place is bright and stagy, with colored neon lights outlining classical Roman facades enlivened with chrome and hundreds of tiny water jets. It has become a favorite illustration for books and articles on postmodern-ism, pro or con.


Still, the postmodernists are a scattered and divergent group. Moore sees them divided in many ways: There are humanists aiming at more meaningful, livable buildings, and stylists aiming at developing a new look. Moore is a humanist. There are those who want to reconstruct the past and those want to use the past for a new architecture. Moore favors a new architecture. There are populists who draw their images from the people who will use a building and historicists who draw more from historical research. Moore is a populist. There are universalists trying to transcend their locale and regionalists searching for a sense of place. Moore is a regionalist.


The place that most fires Moore's imagination is California. He considers himself basically a California architect ''in spite of everything, though most of my work is elsewhere, in places like Houston and Hanover (N.H.).''


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.[2] The dissertation is significant for being one of the first pieces of architectural scholarship to draw from the work of Gaston Bachelard.[3] Moore used some of the material in his later book, The Poetics of Gardens.[4]


While at Yale Moore wrote a useful residential design book: The Place of Houses.[12] 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.[13] 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.


Moore preferred bold, colorful design elements, including striking color combinations, supergraphics, stylistic eclecticism, and the use of non-traditional materials such as plastic, (aluminized) PET film, platinum tiles, and neon signs. His work often provokes arousal, challenges norms, and can lean toward kitsch. His mid-1960s New Haven residence, published in Playboy, featured an open, freestanding shower in the middle of the room, its water nozzled through a giant sunflower. His house in Orinda, California was also sybaritic, featuring an aedicula over the bed, a tree growing inside through the roof, and much natural light. He made no bones about his love for roadside vernacular buildings in places like San Miguel Allende, the Sunset Strip, and Main Street in Disneyland.


Eight columns, in groups of four, sustain two aediculae of different dimensions supporting two asymmetrical pyramidal roofs located within the main roof. These two sub-spaces inside the larger volume articulate the interior, and as they are painted white, they contrast with the rest of the surfaces. Between the two pavilions, a high bookcase structures the place for the beds. Only the toilet, some shelves and the cooking area are enclosed behind a wall, while all the rest of the space is freely distributed under the main roof.


Endlessly peripatetic, Moore never settled down and never rooted himself. The same was true, to a certain extent, of his buildings. For all of their interpretations of local traditions and fitting into place, they were thin and restless things. Not for Moore massive monuments and tragic forms (even though he had taught for Louis Kahn). He wanted to have fun and thought architecture should be equally light-hearted, even if it was serious business.


Since 1896, The Architectural Review has scoured the globe for architecture that challenges and inspires. Buildings old and new are chosen as prisms through which arguments and broader narratives are constructed. In their fearless storytelling, independent critical voices explore the forces that shape the homes, cities and places we inhabit.


Architecture is a complex engagement between people and the things which surround them. The architect's task is to make places and buildings that nurture and enrich that engagement, bringing imaginative, critical, responsible thought to the making of things - so that they will stand, stir, accommodate, intrigue, sustain attention, and take a rightful place in people's lives.


Professor Lyndon's work as an architect, author and educator concerned with the design of places has been widely recognized. While at CED he was a member of the Graduate Group for the Design of Urban Places and taught in both the Architecture and Master of Urban Design programs.


His work as an educator was honored in 1997 with the AIA-ACSA's Topaz Award, the highest award in architectural education. He has served as a Chancellor's Professor and as the Eva Li Professor at Berkeley. Research activity includes examination of the structure of place and the ethical dimensions of design.


It was a house for his own pleasure; a place to retreat, to and be within much loved surroundings. He wanted to have a sort of basic enclosure, whilst all the while being connected to the outside. He started with the idea of two aedicules forming the two cores of the space. Then, out of necessity, he introduced a thin, movable outer shell, that allows the opening of the four corners of the house.


After 1974 Moore worked mostly in Los Angeles with the Urban Innovations Group of the University of California at Los Angeles' School of Architecture and Perez Associates, with whom he designed his best-known project, the Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans, Louisiana. An urban square dedicated to the city's Italian community, it provides a place to play in the water in the setting of a theatrical spectacle akin to Rome's Trevi Fountain. He did it by creating a map of Italy out of marble and concrete paving stones, framed with a backdrop of playful curved walls in the form of abstracted colonnades and triumphal arches, all made of metal panels, stucco, and neon lights. It creates a magical sense of place, the goal being to provide a dream of Italy. Like much of his architecture, including his design for the Wonderwall of the New Orleans Worlds Fair, it combines references to ancient architecture with modern-day kitsch and expresses interest in the contrast between seriousness and functionality and the gayer possibilities of parody and irony. 2ff7e9595c


0 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page