Two Postmodernists
Charles W. Moore
&
Robert Venturi
Moore & Venturi
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Both Postmodernists
Contemporary
In the Gray Group (Historic Oriented)
Educators
Published Theorists
Practicing Architects
Postmodern Architect
Charles W. Moore
Charles W. Moore (1925-1993)
• Background
• Written Works
• Selected Design Works
Charles Willard Moore (1925-1993)
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Architect
Theorist and Author
Educator
Received many awards
for Contribution and
Building Design
Bibliography
• 1947: graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in
architecture
• Worked in San Francisco, served two years in the Army Corps of
Engineers
• Received Master’s Degree and a Ph.D in architectural history
from Princeton University
• Taught at Princeton, University of California at Berkeley, Yale,
University of California Los Angeles and University of Texas,
Austin
• Practiced architecture under the firm identification "MLTW" –
Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull, Whitaker; Centerbrook; Urban
Innovations Group; Moore, Ruble, Yudell; Moore/Anderson
Architects
Moore’s Books
12 Co-authored Books including:
• (1974) The Place of Houses (with Gerald Allen and Donlyn
Lyndon)
• (1976) Dimensions. Space, Shape and Scale in Architecture
(with Gerald Allen)
• (1977) Body, Memory and Architecture (with Kent C. Bloomer)
• (1988) The Poetics of Gardens (with William J. Mitchell and
William Turnbull, Jr.)
• (1994) Chambers for a Memory Palace (with Donlyn Lyndon)
• You Have to Pay for the Public Life: Selected Essays of Charles
W. Moore (2001)
Moore’s Roles and Interests
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Post-Modernist Architect (one of the Gray)
Knowledgeable in Architectural History
Inclusive Design (like Venturi)
Public Life and Public Spaces
Pop Architecture (reject pure Modern)
Prefers Wonder and Excitement of Everyday
Environments
“Santa Barbara” in The Place of Houses
(1974)
• Sense of place
– Relaxed air of Mediterranean dream
– The common imagery give a sense of “being in
the same place”
• The application and preservation of
Mediterranean style architecture
Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara as a Unique Place
• Relationships between people and enclosures (white
stucco walls, tile roofs, iron grills, arcades, columns,
balconies, hedges, trees and mountain)
• Public realm to live in as much as the private
• Encouraging and dramatizing the act of public
habitation  a stage for daily action
• So much cares and agreements were spent on it
• Physical embodiment of the shared dream
Body Memory and Architecture
(1977)
• Introductory lecture on basic problem in architecture
• About how buildings are experienced before [more than]
how they are built
• Anthropological conception of architecture
• Architecture is measured by the way it is experienced
by the human body in space
• Basic elements as objects of human perception– space,
site, walls, roof, etc., especially orders
Body Memory and Architecture (1977)
• Architecture as the projection of human
experience (house or city)
• Architecture is physical and psychological,
possession of place by inhabitant who confirms
his own identity in the symbols of individual and
historic memory (สถาปัตยกรรมเป็ นการยึดครองสถานที่ทาง
กายภาพและทางจิตวิทยาของผูอ้ ยู่ ที่ได้ยนื ยันอัตลักษณ์ของตนเอง
ด้วยสัญลักษณ์ส่วนตัว และความทรงจาต่อประวัติศาสตร์)
Problems with Modernism
• Architectural beliefs became severely “rational”
• Architecture as a highly specialized system with a set of
prescribed technical goals rather than a sensual social
art responsive to real human desires and feeling
• Relied more on 2D diagram and quantifiable features
than colorful 3D qualities of the whole architectural
experience
• Cartesian notion of space and measurement
• Human body has not been a central concern in the
understanding of architectural form
Moore’s Intentions
• Re-examine the significance of the human body in
architecture
• Examine some post-Cartesian philosophical and
psychological thoughts as they pertain to changing
views of architecture
• Review some models of perception that have been
influential in the 20th century
• Discuss vocabulary of architectural forms and their
relationships
Beyond the Body Boundary
• We used to measure and order the world out from
our own bodies (we don’t anymore)
• Cartesian spatial relationship of thing and
coordinates (x, y, z)
• No connection with the body-centered, value
charged sense of space
• Except single-family house
Cartesian Coordinates and Order
Single Family House
• Free standing
• Based on our sense of ourselves extended beyond the
boundaries of our bodies to the world around
• With a face and a back– up and down
• With a hearth (a heart)
• Looks like face (door like a mouth, windows like eyes, a
roof like forehead)
• Detail outside tells a story about the interior
• This house façade is not a billboard, a simple sign, but
rather the complex intimation of much more within
• The lawn as personal envelop or personal space
Single Family House
The Lawn
Extensions from the Body
• Basic enclosure
(womb)
• Toward the public
Identity of the Body
Body of Christ, Body of Politic
Body of the King
The Sense of Beauty
• Laws and priorities governing our sense of
beauty
• Aesthetics comes from the Greek aesthetikos =
of sense perception
• Reason and Thought vs. Sense and Emotion
Different Philosophical Standpoints
Beauty, Sense
and Thought
“One must deduce the
meaning of buildings,
not sense them”
(Descartes)
“Sensible knowledge
is of course inferior to
knowledge developed
by the mind alone”
(Baumgarten)
The Aesthetic
Feeling
Compared with
Measurement
• Mechanical measurement
(actual bigness)
• Visual measurement (the
bigness it appears to have)
• Bodily measurement (the
feeling of bigness)
• Only the last has aesthetic
value
Sense Perception
• Five Basic Senses as Perceptual Systems,
aggressively seeking information (J. J. Gibson)
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Visual system
Auditory system
Taste-smell system
Basic-orienting system
Haptic system
• The last two contribute the most to our
understanding of 3Ds and architectural experience
The Sense of Dwelling
• We do not aggressively seek architectural form
• We experience satisfaction in architecture by
desiring it and dwelling in it, not seeking it
• We require a measure of possession and
surrounding to feel the impact and the beauty of
a building
The Sense of Dwelling
Body-Image Theory
• We have unconscious and changing images of our
bodies (separate from our knowledge)
• We unconsciously locate our bodies inside a 3dimensional boundary (changing according to
internal and external events and strength)
• The body boundary can be modified by clothes,
badges, weapons, an automobile or an airplane
that connect directly to the body and is subject to
body-reflex actions
Body Movement
• The Spatiality of Movement
– Awareness of gravity and maintenance of a center
– Directions (up, down, left, right)
• The Building as a Stimulus for Movement
– Architecture functions as a potential stimulus for movement,
real or imagined
• The Building as a Stage for Movement
– Awareness of our own movements in relation to the
boundaries as well as our spatial relationship to one another
The Stage for Movement
The Stage for Movement
Vocabulary of Architectural Forms
The inhabited world within boundaries that can be identify
as a syntax of:
• Place: distinguishable from the world around them
• Path: limited variety, going one point to another or
returning to the same point again
• Pattern: composed mostly with paths and places (with
recognizable system as bounded space)
• Edge: the end of domain with walls, façades, parapets,
walls, face out, and the fold in the system or face out
from it
Place
Path
Pattern
Edge
Human Identity in Memorable Places
• What missing from our dwellings are the potential
transactions between body, imagination and
environment
• We will care increasingly for our buildings if:
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There is some meaningful order in them
There is definite boundaries to contain our concerns
We can inhabit them
We can establish connection with what we know, believe and
think
– We can share with others
– Some sense of human drama, of transport, of tension, or of
collision of forces
The Real [memorable] Place
They are memorable because
• They are unique
• They affect our bodies and generate enough
associations to hold it in our personal worlds
• They are susceptible to continuous readings–
complex and ambiguous ones
• Changeability
Moore’s Preferences and Styles
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Neo-Vernacular
Historic References
Pseudo Public Space and Historic Elements
Movements
Analogy of Water (flexible arrangement– out of,
go in pass through, up and down, etc.)
• Dramatic Experiences/ Choreographic Work
Examples of Architectural Design:
Moore and Others
Moore House (1962)
"Its forms admittedly derive from primitive huts and from Mayan or
Hindu temples…and Moore makes it clear that he was thinking in broad
and recollective terms when he made the design."
Gerald Allen
Sea Ranch
Condominium
(1965) California
Kresge College,
University of California
(1973)
• Promote feeling of
community
• Shopping mall concept
• Paths
• Bodies moving through
planes or stage
• Trivial monuments
Kresge College (1973)
Burns House (1974)
California
"The Burns House was designed for an urban planner...and he brought at least two specific
requirements to it. The building should reflect the patterns and traditions of life in southern
California, and it also had to house a fine baroque pipe organ... The result is a series of sheds
and towers,… but here clothed in more regionally apposite stucco in many shades of ochre,
orange, and mauve…”
Gerald Allen
Burns House (1974)
Piazza d’Italia
(1977)
New Orleans
Hood Museum of Art (1983)
New Hampshire
Hood Museum of Art
Beverly Hills Civic Center (1988-90)
California
Urban architecture, which enriches public life
Old City Hall from 1939
Beverly Hills Civic
Center
Plaza
Beverly Hills Civic Center
Movements
Beverly Hills Civic Center
Details
Afterwards
• There are no schemes for multifamily housing or largescale urban reconstruction that satisfy all the senses of
the body and nurture the memory as well
• The design of the environment is a choreography of the
familiar and the surprising, in which the familiar has the
central role, and a major function of the surprising is to
render the familiar afresh
Comparison: Venturi and Moore
(both apply historic elements—the grey)
Venturi
• Emphasize message
• Symbol in the environment
• View from outside
• Ambiguity
• More superficial
• Use historic elements
unconventionally
Moore
• Emphasize body sense
• Body experience extended
• View (feel) from within
• Dramatic
• More philosophical
• Use unconventional
elements to achieve
historic memory
Architecture as…
Venturi: Symbol
Moore: Experience