Charles Moore

Books by moore
 WATER AND ARCHITECTURE

 THE PLACE OF HOUSES

 DIMENSIONS

 BODY MEMORY AND ARCHITECTURE

THE POETICS OF GARDENS

 THE CITY OBSERVED: LOS ANGELES

 CHAMBERS FOR A MEMORY PALACE

Principles
• If we are to devote our lives to making buildings, we
have to believe that they are worth it, that they live and
speak and can receive investments of energy and care
from their inhabitants, and can store those investments,
and return them augmented, bread cast on water come
back as club sandwiches.
• speaks of living and speaking places, in which habitation
supports interplay between occupant and structure that
leads to a particular kind of relationship. Good buildings
evoke thoughts, feelings and stories. They convey stories
about their location, their construction, and about the
people who made them, have lived in them and use them.
If buildings are to speak, they must have freedom of speech. It seems to
me that one of the most serious dangers to architecture is that people
may just lose interest in it… If architecture is to survive in the human
consciousness, then the things buildings can say, be they wistful or wise
or powerful or gently or heretical or silly, have to respond to the wide
range of human feelings.

Postmodernists like Moore wrote passionately about architecture as

communication, as a medium to reflect human experience. It follows that if
buildings can ‘speak’ about how they were built and about the people who
use them and who built them, then what they say must be unconstrained.
This principle declares the right of freedom of speech for architecture and
the architect. In reaction to the possible perception that modernism’s strict
functionalist code stifled freedom of expression, architects must not have
their voices dictated, Moore declares. When an architectural paradigm or
period ends, it must be possible for the architect to express a new
collective or personal voice, without the ‘censorship’ imposed by a
dominant design theory, paradigm, movement or fashion.
FAMOUS WORKS

PIAZZA D’ITALIA

The Piazza D'Italia is an urban public plaza located at Lafayette and

Commerce Streets in downtown New Orleans, Louisiana.

The location ultimately chosen for the Piazza D’Italia was a city block sited in
the semi-derelict upriver edge of downtown, four blocks from Canal Street
and the edge of the French Quarter and three blocks from the Mississippi
River.

By the mid-1970s, this area had already endured several decades of disfavor and was
littered with abandoned or barely utilized mid-19th-century commercial row houses,
early-20th-century industrial architecture and obsolete port infrastructure.

The Piazza D'Italia, it was hoped, would trigger a wave of investment in the
Warehouse District and along New Orleans' downtown riverfront, and more
generally ignite interest in downtown.
Piazza D'Italia
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN STYLE:
SPANISH REVIVAL, ART DECO AND
POST-MODERN

The central fountain, located in the

middle of a city block, was accessed in
two directions: via a tapering,
keyhole-shaped passage extending
from Poydras Street, or through an
arched opening in the clock tower PLAN OF PIZZA D’ITLIA
sited where Commerce Street
terminates at Lafayette Street.
The fountain and its surrounding colonnades playfully appropriated classical
forms and orders, executing them in modern materials (e.g., stainless steel,
neon) or kinetically (e.g., suggesting the acanthus leaves of traditional
Corinthian capitals through the use of water jets).

There are six concentric colonnades out of which five

of them, represent the five classical orders of
architecture( Doric, Corinthian, Tuscan and Composite)
in proper order with the proper capitals, and there’s a
sixth stylized colonnade in front, the red one and
called The Delicatessen Order(tee hee) which closely
looks like Ironic Order or Dorky Order

DELICATESSEN ORDERS

WATER FLOW IN PIZZA D’ITALIA

BEVERLY HILLS CIVIC CENTER
The civic centre was designed by Charles Moore. Drawing upon the Spanish
Revival architecture of the city hall, Moore designed this building in a mixture of
Spanish Revival, Art Deco and Post-Modern styles. It includes courtyards,
colonnades, promenades, and buildings, with both open and semi-enclosed
spaces, stairways and balconies.

BEVERLY HILLS CIVIC CENTER

The most striking aspect of the plan was a string of three colonnaded
oval plazas that established a diagonal axis across the two blocks,
tying the civic center to the business triangle. The plazas transformed
the free-standing City Hall into a background building, putting the
emphasis on the open space

PLAN OF BEVERLY HILLS CIVIC CENTER

Three oval courtyards bounded by tiled arcades are arranged diagonally on a north-
south axis, linking the two city blocks that comprise the civic center.

The use of colorful tile alludes to City Hall’s tiled dome, and the terraced courtyard on
the building’s western elevation reflects its original design, with scroll-topped patio
walls decorated with urns and two fountains in a symmetrical garden.

The court gardens, planted with palms and subtropical plants, are abstractions of
Southern California landscapes

They are connected by a series of fountains and pools fed by a "desert oasis"
represented by a mass of boulders at the site’s upper edge.

PALMS AROUND BEVERLY CIVIC CENTER