Charless Moore

Postmodernity and Architecture

Charles Moore: Building Places

Charles Moore

Piazza d’Italia

Ground Plan

New Orleans

1976-1979


Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia

The most telling example of postmodern architecture is Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans - not because the historical forms of the classic orders were used in an almost excessive profusion, but because a fiction was created in a direct way. The Piazza (New Orleans, 1976-1979) was intended to become the center of a predominantly Italian section of New Orleans where the Italo-American Institute is located. The immediate arein fact, the entire part of the city - was in need of renovat-ion and was dominated by large modern edifices. There was nothing alluring or inviting about the area little to

Charles MoorePiazza d’Italia

New Orleans, 1976-1979

Charles Moore

Piazza d’Italia

New Orleans

1976-1979

Charles Moore

Piazza d’Italia

Socales ofTuscan Columns

New Orleans

1976-1979


Charles Moore’ Piazza d’Italia

make one linger. Moore created a totally building site by cutting into the space intended for a projected building(never executed). The site is circular. Groups of columns provide a backdrop for a topographic map of Italy, which juts out from the middle of a large arcade and reaches right into the center of the concentric circles of the piazza, with a fountain as the Mediterranean. (Sicily has the central position, because most of the residents of the neighborhood are Sicilian). The piazza wall was supposed to be the purely decorative part of the project building, against whose modern forms, smooth white facade, and simple square

Charles Moore

Piazza d’Italia

Showing Portraitof Charles Moore

New Orleans

1976-1979



windows openings its breathtakingly classical decorum was to contrast sharply. All the classical orders are present: Doric, Tuscan (red and square), Ionian (inside Arch), and Corinthian (Arch, center) and Composite (sides of Arch in yellow). Together they provide the “boot” of Italy with a complete cultural background and a reminiscence of the heroic columnar orders of Italian architectural facades. However, classical greatness in evoked here with touches of humour and commented on with irony. There are collars of neon-light tubing under the capitals of the central arcade. Other



“columns” are actually curved sheets of steel,with rivulets of water creating effect ¯ of fluting (decoration consistingof long, rounded grooves, as in a column). The Tuscan columns next to these Doric “columns” are made steel and are “cut open” to reveal marble. Their metopes are “wetopes” with tiny fountains. (an opening hole in frieze for beam; any of the square areas, plain or decorated, between triglyphs in a Doric frieze. On this “narrative” plane, the classical columnar orders are reinterpreted through the playful divestment of their monumental dignity. Yet, at the same time, the architraves (horizontal beam



between the columns and the top) are inscribed with words of dedication and with the title Fons sancti Jesephi (Fountain of Saint Joseph], and the architect’s face is immortalized in a water-spouting mask in the spandrel.The Piazza d’Italia was created solely for the purpose of fiction. The collonade fragments of this stage of memory do not ant to be serious, perfect architecture. Rather they want to be the vocabulary of a narrative: architecture between the Old World and the New, between wit and seriousness, between perfection and fragmentation,



between the columns and the top) are inscribed with words of dedication and with the title Fons sancti Jesephi (Fountain of saint Joseph], and the architect's face is immortalized in a water-spouting mask in the spandrel.The Piazza d’Italia was created solely for the purpose of fiction. The collonade fragments of this stage of memory do not ant to be serious, perfect architecture. Rather they want to be the vocabulary of a narrative: architecture between the Old World and the New, between wit and seriousness, between perfection and fragmentation, between historicalexactness and humorous alienation. The Piazza risks making


Charles Moore

the political statement “Here is Italy!” only to add immediately, with a sad smile, “Italy is not here.” Charles Moore (who, although he came from the Midwest and studied at Princeton and Yale, must be considered the head of the Californian school) is an architect who knows how to use modest means to create complex, exciting spaces that combine surprise with familiarity. Moore has developed theinterview with a client into an art. While carrying on an intense dialogue, he makes little hieroglyphic sketches that capture all the client’s wishes - the obscure as well as the obvious ones. The summoning up and examining of


Charles Moore

conscious and unconscious wishes connected to housing and to being sheltered is the starting point for Moore’s architectural endeavors and for his architectural theory, both of which are focused on “making places”. Moore has searched as no other contemporary architect has to find architectural means of meeting the most marginal human needs as well as the anthropologically constant ones, and to respond with innovative as well as with archetypal motifs to promptings which our orientation toward securing our existence predominantly in terms of the means-to-an-end rationality hardly ever allows for.


Charles Moore

To make a house a place of shelter and personal identity is an avowed aim to all architects. However, the need for adequate human shelter can hardly be met with an architectural language that is attuned more to the dictates of geometrically perfect figurations than to the wishes of the inhabitants. What is more important to Moore and his Partners is “making places rather than manipulating formal configurations,” and this statement rejects a modernism that places its faith in the effectiveness of pure geometric forms and holds a successful composition of such forms to be the highest goal of architecture.


Charles Moore

Moore’s own house Orinda, California, (1960-1962) is such a place. One feels at home in an almost primordial way in this bachelor house, a one-room, single-level rectangular unit. Light comes in from the sides and from an opening in the tent-like roof. The whole thing is grasped at a glance. Some of the walls slide open like a large barn doors, so that one can look out on the countryside, the lawn, and the surrounding plants. The glass surfaces extend from the floor to the ceiling. Looking out, one has the impression of Moore’s grand piano standing as an amusing alien object in midst

Charles Moore

House of Charles Moore

Orinda, California

1960-1962

Charles Moore


Orinda, California

1960-1962


Charles Moore

of the green outdoors. The co-presence and intertwining of disparate elements is used as much as a narrative means by Moore as the exploration of essential relationships and basic interconnections.The four columns in the center of the house set off the living and dining area as a place within a place, with its own roof and its own skylight. [...]. Since ancient times the space marked off by four columns in a square formation has had a profound significance; it has stood for the center of the universe. For a person sitting inside an aedicula, secure under the projection of a ciborium, the world


Charles Moore

is concentrated in that space; if another person enters the space, their joint presence acquires the aspect of a ceremony. Architecture as the framework of ceremony is Moore’s intended goal; function is a side issue. The space seems to be an ideal prototype of space. And the fact that the four supports of the baldachin are actual Tuscan columns from a nineteenth-century building introduces a temporal dimension that connects the present with the past. For Moore, a house must always refer to something beyond itself, and only when dreams have a chance of being

Charles Moore


Orinda, California

1960-1962


Charles Moore

realized does a house become a place of shelter and of identity. Moore’s living room aedicula is not an object for use or a suitable implement of practical goals but an element of fiction, a poetic metaphor for the center of the world. The house at Orinda also has a second, smaller aedicula: a monumentalized shower cabin. For Moore the morning shower is a ceremonial pleasure, and his shower cabin certainly reflects this; however, the real “purpose” of the smaller aedicula is to relativize the larger one and to humanize it with a gentle touch of irony.


Charles Moore

The skylights in he ceilings of the two aediculas (placed off center, perhaps so as not to appear too nearly perfect) also serve to minimize the representative aspect of the form.

Charles Moore


Orinda, California

1960-1962


Charles Moore

Moore’s little house at Orinda is permeated by a hard-to-define sense of comfort and by a “power of place” that connects ceremony and humour. It is a place of fiction, whose illusionistic power is much more potent than the most compelling objective elements. Along with Robert Venturi’s “My Mother’s House" (also completed in 1962), it represents a turning away from the ruling notions of the International Style. The combination of historical columns, a saddle roof, barn doors, and floor-to-ceiling glass walls was a fundamentally new thing and a questioning of the progressive stance of modernism.


Charles Moore

To every architect thinking in terms of modernist notions, what Moore termed the “creation of a place” was bound to seem a mystification of architectonic space and a lapse from the spirit of rationalism. The aesthetic of stereometry would have called for a simple shell as the enclosure of an unbroken spatial unit, as in Philip Johnson’s glass house. But Moore did not want any abstract rationalist simplification; he was striving to present a fiction based not on the composition of solid forms but on the idea of home and of security. Thus, human emotions and the human need for protection became fundamental motivational


Charles Moore

factors in the design process. The aediculas were typological answers to archetypal wishes. A functional analysis, such as the calculation of the most efficient use of kitchen space, was not capable of fulfilling such wishes. The range of the to architecture was widened when psychological needs that had been neglected as functionally irrelevant began to be treated as necessary conditions requiring formal definition.

Documents

Charless Moore