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3. LSDesign: Charles W. Moore and the Delirious Interior
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CHAPTER THREE LSDesign Charles W. Moore and the Delirious Interior In December 1979, Progressive Architecture asked American architects to nominate the most influential architects from among their peers. Charles Moore (1925–1993) made the top ten. He also came in first in terms of number of pages devoted to a single architect by the magazine. His influence was not confined to the profession but extended deep into academia as well. In 1989 the American Collegiate Schools of Architecture, in partnership with the American Institute of Architects, awarded him the Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education. The board conferring the award described him as “a brilliant and inspiring force who has transformed the character of architectural education in this country.”1 The remark was not an exaggeration. Moore trained many of the teachers who came to dominate architectural education in the 1980s. The biographies and collections of his essays attest to his intellectual range.2 Exhibitions of his work have underscored his pivotal influence on the student protests at Yale in the late 1960s.3 But some of Moore’s most significant academic achievements have not received scholarly attention. Partly this is because his defense of fantasy as the poetic source of design has been misinterpreted as the mark of an intellectual lightweight not worthy of serious study. It is also partly because Moore’s career involved groping toward goals that were not transparent to him and therefore never overtly stated. Some of his contributions can be appreciated only retroactively in light of their historical unfolding. Moore was deeply concerned with clarifying the nature of the architect’s intellectual work. As a student, he became frustrated by the fact that the standard of architectural scholarship had been established by art historians, who restricted the definition of intellectual work to textual historical analysis. Moore would help legitimize a notion of intellectuality based on different standards of competency, including visual proficiency and the ability to grasp the historical essence of buildings experientially. Moore’s interest in experience led him early on to the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard, whom he interpreted for 100 architectural audiences. Although later in life Moore de-emphasized phenomenology as too theoretical, his work was central to the formation of architectural phenomenology. Moore’s major contribution to architectural discourse has been interpreted by authors like Charles Jencks as turning the attention of architects toward decoration and playful superficiality, instead of the structure of the building.4 This is not incorrect, but it is only part of the story. Moore’s interest in decoration was a function of his fascination with interiors and ultimately with the inner world of human experience. His “superficiality” was rooted in an obsession with achieving profound experiences. To properly situate Moore in the intellectual history of postmodern architecture, we must distinguish between his intellectual work and his architectural aesthetics, even if Moore himself insisted on conflating the two. Forgetting Modernism Moore developed his derision of postwar modernism during his student years at Princeton between 1954 and 1957. At 29, and a recent veteran of the Korean War, Moore was more mature than most of his classmates in the School of Architecture . To Jean Labatut, then director of Graduate Studies, it became clear that Moore was unusually talented. Labatut took a special interest in Moore, mentored him, and distinguished him with positions of responsibility. Moore quickly found himself having to take the side of his mentor in the departmental politics that pitted Labatut against Robert McLaughlin, dean of the school, over the pedagogical direction of the program. In competition with other Ivy League universities , McLaughlin sought to increase Princeton’s symbolic capital by luring the celebrities of international style modernism to the school. Labatut worked against McLaughlin by attracting renowned architects who “assimilated history” into their buildings, like Enrico Peresutti and Louis Kahn.5 Moore recalled: Dean McLaughlin tried to run a countertrend to people like Labatut and Peresutti. He brought down people from New York to lecture us, like Gordon Bunshaft . . . He was perhaps the most unpleasant creep I ever met. Really awful. All these sharp New Yorkers wheeled in to instruct the young of Princeton . . . When the heroes of the modern movement came, we usually thought they were the prime idiots of all time. I remember Siegfried Giedion announcing (in a thick German accent, suitable only for Harvard) that 101 LSDESIGN [44.222.149.13] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:18 GMT) the ideal size for a city was seven hundred thousand. And...