Postmodernity and Architecture

Charles Moore: Building Places

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Charles Moore Piazza dItalia Ground Plan New Orleans 1976-1979

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Charles Moores Piazza dItalia

Postmodernity and Architecture

The most telling example of postmodern architecture is Charles Moores Piazza dItalia 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 5/3/12 the center

Charles Moore Piazza dItalia New Orleans, 1976-1979

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Charles Moore Piazza dItalia New Orleans 1976-1979

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Charles Moore Piazza dItalia Socales of Tuscan Columns New Orleans 1976-1979

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Charles Moore Piazza dItalia

Postmodernity and Architecture

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 5/3/12 piazza, with

Charles Moore Piazza dItalia Showing Portrait of Charles Moore New Orleans 1976-1979
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Charles Moore Piazza dItalia

Postmodernity and Architecture

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 5/3/12 background and a reminiscence of the heroic

Charles Moore Piazza dItalia

Postmodernity and Architecture

columns are actually curved sheets of steel,with rivulets of water creating effect of fluting (decoration consisting of 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 5/3/12 hole in frieze

Charles Moores Piazza dItalia

Postmodernity and Architecture

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 architects face is immortalized in a water-spouting mask in the spandrel. The Piazza dItalia was created solely for the purpose of fiction. The collonade fragments of this stage 5/3/12 of memory

Postmodernity and Charles MooresArchitecture Piazza dItalia

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 dItalia was created solely for the purpose of fiction. The collonade fragments of this stage of 5/3/12 memory do

Charles Moore

Postmodernity and Architecture

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 5/3/12 spaces that

Charles Moore

Postmodernity and Architecture

conscious and unconscious wishes connected to housing and to being sheltered is the starting point for Moores 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 5/3/12 marginal human needs as well as the

Charles Moore

Postmodernity and Architecture

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 5/3/12

Charles Moore

Postmodernity and Architecture

Moores own house Orinda, California, (19601962) is such a place. One feels at home in an almost primordial way in this bachelor house, a one-room, singlelevel 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 5/3/12 slide open like a large barn doors, so that one

Charles Moore House of Charles Moore Orinda, California

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1960-1962

Charles Moore House of Charles Moore Orinda, California 1960-1962

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Charles Moore

Postmodernity and Architecture

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 5/3/12 own roof and its own skylight. [...]. Since

Charles Moore

Postmodernity and Architecture

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 Moores 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 5/3/12 Tuscan

Charles Moore House of Charles Moore Orinda, California 1960-1962

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Charles Moore

Postmodernity and Architecture

realized does a house become a place of shelter and of identity. Moores 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. 5/3/12 For Moore the morning shower is a ceremonial

Charles Moore

Postmodernity and Architecture

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.

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Charles Moore House of Charles Moore Orinda, California 1960-1962

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Charles Moore

Postmodernity and Architecture

Moores little house at Orinda is permeated by a hard-todefine 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 Venturis My Mothers House" (also completed in 1962), 5/3/12 it

Charles Moore

Postmodernity and Architecture

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 Johnsons 5/3/12 glass house.

Charles Moore

Postmodernity and Architecture

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 5/3/12

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