![Sample our Built Environment journals, sign in here to start your access, Latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5926/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Built-Environment.jpg"})
Abstract
Charles W. Moore (1925–93) was one of the most important architectural educators in the second half of the twentieth century in America, earning the Topaz Medallion in 1989 for excellence in teaching and scholarship during a career spanning four decades. The theme of “untimely teachers,” applied cautiously, can help clarify Moore’s achievements as a pedagogue. Like other postmodern architects, Moore saw no contradiction between practicing as a creative agent and learning from history. His career thus challenged the radical, iconoclastic rhetoric of modernism that sought rupture with historical precedent and that argued for a uniquely modern Zeitgeist as a determinant of architectural form. Despite this historical turn, Moore was neither a revivalist nor a historian. His enthusiasm for history was mediated by a sense of contemporaneity. Based on archival research and interviews with former students, this essay focuses on the years Moore taught at the Yale School of Architecture, where he decisively reworked the design curriculum to reflect his interests. What emerges is a time in architectural education when precedent could shape the future.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Moore taught at Princeton University from 1958 to 1959, the University of California, Berkeley from 1959 to 1965, Yale University from 1965 to 1975 (returning as a visiting professor after 1975), the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1975 to 1985, and the University of Texas at Austin, from 1985 to 1993.
2 Richard W. Hayes, The Yale Building Project: The First 40 Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Yale School of Architecture, 2007).
3 Robert A.M. Stern and Jimmy Stamp, Pedagogy and Place: 100 Years of Architectural Education at Yale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 252–53.
4 Anthony Vidler, “Architecture’s Expanded Field,” Artforum 42 (April 2004): 142–47; David Littlejohn, Architect: The Life and Work of Charles W. Moore (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 161–62.
5 John Pastier, “ACSA/AIA Honor Charles Moore for Excellence in Education,” Architecture: The AIA Journal 78 (March 1989): 23–26. See also Kevin P. Keim, An Architectural Life: Memoirs & Memories of Charles W. Moore (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1996), 272.
6 Vincent Scully, “The Architecture of Community,” in Modern Architecture and Other Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 345.
7 Spiro Kostof, “The Shape of Time at Yale, Circa 1960,” in The History of History in American Schools of Architecture 1865–1975, ed. Gwendolyn Wright and Janet Parks (New York: The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 1990), 123.
8 Stuart Wrede observed that in his use of history Moore was “playful and humorous, [and had] a bit of a campy sensibility, and certainly a sense of Pop.” Email to the author, November 22, 2023.
9 Gwendolyn Wright, “History for Architects,” in The History of History, ed. Wright and Parks, 17. See also Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 9.
10 “Chronology,” in Charles Moore: Buildings and Projects 1949-1986, ed. Eugene J. Johnson (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 300–302. See also Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 348.
11 Moore defined vulnerability as “open to all kinds of things (nobody is open to everything) in the world around you” in Charles Moore, “Schindler and Richardson,” in Dimensions: Space, Shape & Scale in Architecture, ed. Charles Moore and Gerald Allen (New York: McGraw-Hill Publications, 1976), 167–74.
12 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1957), 4.
13 Quoted in Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 277.
14 Wright, “History for Architects,” 39.
15 Eve Blau, “This Work Is Going Somewhere: Pedagogy and Politics at Yale in the Late 1960s,” Log 38 (October 2016): 131–49.
16 Keim, An Architectural Life, 220–34.
17 For Moore’s interest in Schindler, see Moore, “Schindler and Richardson,” in Dimensions, ed. Moore and Allen, 167–74.
18 Michelangelo Sabatino, “The Poetics of the Ordinary: The American Places of Charles W. Moore,” Places 19, no. 2 (2007): 62–71.
19 Keim, An Architectural Life, 34.
20 Keim, An Architectural Life, 56.
21 Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), ix.
22 Charles W. Moore, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” Perspecta 9–10 (1965): 57–106.
23 Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
24 Charles Moore, “After a New Architecture: The Best Shape for a Chimera,” Oppositions 3 (May 1974): 1–16.
25 Charles W. Moore, “The Yin, the Yang, and the Three Bears,” in Charles Moore Buildings and Projects, ed. Johnson, 19.
26 Norman Mailer, “The Big Bite,” Esquire 60 (February 1963), 24; reprinted in “Mailer vs. Scully,” Architectural Forum 120 (April 1964), 96–97.
27 Alison B. Hirsch, “The Fate of Lawrence Halprin’s Public Spaces: Three Case Studies” (MSc thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2005), 4–5.
28 Herbert Muschamp, “Architecture View: In This Dream Station, Future and Past Collide,” New York Times (June 20, 1993), H1.
29 Charles W. Moore, “Personal Statement,” Architecture + Urbanism, extra issue, “The Work of Charles W. Moore” (May 1978), 10.
30 Martin Filler, “Charles Moore: House Vernacular,” Art in America 68 (August 1980), 110.
31 Charles Moore, “Self-Portrait,” Architecture d’aujourd’hui 184 (1976): xiv.
32 Moore, “Personal Statement,” A + U, 13–14.
33 Moore, “Personal Statement,” A + U, 15.
34 Quoted in Littlejohn, Architect, 118.
35 Littlejohn, Architect, 118.
36 Keim states that Moore’s dissertation was controversial because of its plethora of literary references—Keim, An Architectural Life, 64.
37 Charles Willard Moore, “Water and Architecture” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1957), iv.
38 Moore, “Water and Architecture” iii.
39 Moore, “Water and Architecture” 169.
40 Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 102.
41 Moore, “Water and Architecture,” ii.
42 Littlejohn, Architect, 117.
43 Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 29.
44 Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, 103.
45 Quoted in Littlejohn, Architect, 118.
46 Robert Venturi, “Essay Derived from the Acceptance Speech, the Madison Medal, Princeton University,” in Electronics and Iconography Upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room, ed. Robert Venturi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 93.
47 Quoted in Littlejohn, Architect, 121.
48 Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building was featured on the cover of the February 1964 issue of Progressive Architecture, for example, with Rudolph’s head superimposed on one of the concrete towers.
49 Quoted in Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 199.
50 Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 245.
51 Quoted in Hayes, The Yale Building Project, 15.
52 F. Andrus Burr, “Learning under Moore,” in GA Houses Special Issue: Charles Moore and Company (1980), 173.
53 Handwritten note by Charles Moore, n.d., box 14, Charles W. Moore Archives, Alexander Architectural Archives, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin.
54 Denise Scott Brown, telephone interview with the author, December 1, 2023.
55 Scott Brown, interview.
56 Nicholas Boyarsky, “House X,” in Activism at Home: Architects Dwelling Between Politics, Aesthetics, and Resistance, ed. Isabelle Doucet and Janina Gosseye (Berlin: Jovis, 2021), 161.
57 Spiro Kostof, “The Shape of Time at Yale, Circa 1960,” in The History of History, ed. Wright and Parks, 123–35.
58 Bulletin of Yale University School of Art and Architecture, series 61, January 1, 1965, 26–27.
59 F. Andrus Burr, email to the author, December 8, 2023.
60 For Moore’s lectures at Yale, see Yale University Manuscripts & Archives, School of Architecture, Yale University, lectures and presentations, call number RU880.
61 Charles W. Moore, “Inside and Out,” “The Public and the Private,” and “Large and Small,” SD Space Design (November 1986), 8–14, 15–21, and 22–28, resp. Page 42 of this issue, from “Originality and Influences” is cited below.
62 Quoted in Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 277.
63 Burr, email.
64 Burr, email.
65 Jacob Albert, email to the author, November 13, 2023.
66 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), ills 35, 36, 125, and 171.
67 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 36, 69, 78.
68 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 78.
69 Scott Brown, interview.
70 Charles Moore, “Review of John Soane, The Making of an Architect by Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey,” in You Have to Pay for the Public Life: Selected Essays by Charles W. Moore, ed. Kevin Keim (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 287; Moore, “Originality and Influences,” SD Space Design (1986), 42.
71 Charles Moore, Gerald Allen, and Donlyn Lyndon, The Place of Houses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 229–31.
72 Moore, Allen, and Lyndon, The Place of Houses, 233.
73 Quoted in Keim, An Architectural Life, 118.
74 Stephen Harby, email to the author, December 12, 2023.
75 Albert, email.
76 Blau, “This Work Is Going Somewhere,” 140–46.
77 Moore, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” 65–83.
78 Charles Moore, interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein as part of the series “American Architecture Now,” ca. 1980. Accessed at DukeLibDigitalColl (Duke Digital Library Collection), “American Architecture Now: Charles Moore,” December 11, 2008, interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd5YjS2aI5A.
79 Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, 98.
80 Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, 136.
81 Moore, “After a New Architecture,” 9.
82 For the essays in which Moore discusses these historians, see Keim, ed., You Have to Pay for the Public Life.
83 Kenneth Frampton spoke on “Program and Paradigm: Aalto and Le Corbusier” on October 18, 1974 and “A Critical Analysis of Built Form” on September 24, 1974.
84 John Summerson, “Heavenly Mansions. An Interpretation of Gothic,” in Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), 1–28. The collection was originally published London: Cresset, 1949.
85 Donlyn Lyndon and Charles W. Moore, Chambers for a Memory Palace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 141.
86 Moore, Allen, and Lyndon, The Place of Houses, 53; Moore, “The Yin, the Yang, and the Three Bears,” 18.
87 Moore, “The Yin, the Yang, and the Three Bears,” 18.
88 Lyndon, The Sea Ranch, 42.
89 Quoted in Keim, An Architectural Life, 118.
90 Lyndon and Moore, Chambers for a Memory Palace, 145–47.
91 Robin Middleton described Summerson as “an active propagandist” for modern architecture in “Sir John Summerson (1904-92),” Burlington Magazine 135 (1993): 277–79.
92 Burr, “Learning Under Moore,” 173.
93 Quoted in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 358.
94 Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 377.
95 Richardson, William James, 491.
96 John Dewey, “The School and Society,” in Dewey on Education: Selections, ed. M.S. Dworkin (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1959), 33–90.
97 Martin S. Dworkin, “John Dewey: A Centennial Review,” in Dewey on Education, ed. Dworkin, 6.
98 Dewey, “The School and Society,” 40.
99 Joan Ockman, “Pragmatism/Architecture: The Idea of the Workshop Project,” in The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about “Things in the Making,” ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 17.
100 Bulletin of Yale University School of Art and Architecture, series 55, no. 1, January 1, 1959, 19.
101 Bulletin of Yale University School of Art and Architecture, series 63, no. 1, January 1, 1967, 19.
102 Charles Moore, “Soane, Schinkel, and Jefferson,” in You Have to Pay for the Public Life, ed. Keim, 374.
103 Moore, “Soane, Schinkel, and Jefferson,” 374.
104 Moore, interview with Diamonstein.
105 Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, xii.
106 Eve Blau, Architecture or Revolution: Charles Moore and Yale in the Late 1960s (New Haven, CT: Yale School of Architecture, 2001), np; Martin Filler, “Traveler from an Antique Land,” in Architecture + Urbanism, extra issue, “The Work of Charles W. Moore” (May 1978): 68–75.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Richard W. Hayes
Richard W. Hayes is an architect and architectural historian educated at Columbia and Yale universities. His publications include The Yale Building Project: The First 40 Years (Yale, 2007), a comprehensive history of an influential programme founded by Charles W. Moore. He has also published on Moore in the Journal of Architectural Education, Arris, Scroope: Cambridge Architecture Journal, Agency: Working with Uncertain Architectures, edited by Florian Kossak (Routledge, 2009), and Activism at Home: Architects Dwelling Between Politics, Aesthetics, and Resistance, edited by Isabelle Doucet and Janina Gosseye (Jovis, 2021).