Lecture date: 1981-07-07
‘If buildings are to speak, they must have freedom of speech. If architecture is to survive in the human consciousness, then the things buildings can say, be they wistful or wise or powerful or gentle or heretical or silly, have to respond to the wide range of human feelings.’ Charles Moore discusses his work, showing various projects that demonstrate his humanist approach to housing and architecture. While comparing and contrasting his work with that of another postmodern innovator Robert Venturi (who gave a talk at RIBA on the previous evening), Moore reflects on the rational and the irrational in relation to notions of reality. As an architect, teacher, and writer, Moore has been a leading figure in American architecture and architectural education for three decades, achieving national recognition with the completion in 1966 of Sea Ranch, a Californian condominium project. A decade later he completed the Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, a public plaza designed as a postmodern collage of brightly coloured classical elements. Moore was the chairman of the architecture department at the University of California at Berkeley from 1962 to 1965, before becoming Dean of the Yale School of Architecture.
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