ARCHITECT: The Life and Work of Charles W. Moore

by David Littlejohn ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1984

Call him Post-Modernist, supermannerist, populist, historicist, stage designer--or, as he calls himself, ""inclusionist""--architect Charles Moore is effectively showcased as an eclectic genius-curiosity, at least, in this celebratory collage. Littlejohn, a novelist (The Man Who Killed Mick Jagger, Going to California) and Berkeley journalism professor, shares with Moore an aversion to ""the modernist ideal"" and an allegiance to ""humanism""; his enthusiasm for Moore's breaking-of-rules (random cut-out windows, vertical light-shafts, ""gravity-defying staircases""), his fantasizing and historical/ethnic borrowings, all fits into this ideological framework. (He doesn't see that Moore, ""untainted by modernism,"" is playing with modernist elements. He practically has Moore the inventor of open, interpenetrating spaces.) Nonetheless Littlejohn does capture what makes Moore something of a latter-day Frank Lloyd Wright: the creative imagination and leaky windows, the multiplicity of projects and shaky finances, the happy and unhappy clients, the successful ex-partners and demorahzed juniors. After Littlejohn's long, effusive introduction, there's a week with Moore and collaborators as an illustration of Moore's M*A*S*H working style. . .when it works. A visit to the seven places Moore has built, or rebuilt, for himself. (The most celebrated, Orinda, ""looks like a dump""--and is scorned by its present occupants.) A brief account of his mercurial 1960s rise--telling how he stage-managed exposure in architectural magazines, campaigned to win a major prize each year. (""The celebrity stakes among design professionals eventually affects the world many of us inhabit."") A biographical chapter about his premonitory high-school projects (interchangeable facades, cabinets for junk), the annual family trips to California or Florida (""cities. . .were very interesting places""). Also: peer-recollections of Princeton as an anti-modernist incubator; testimony from old MLTW partners (""I would defer. . .not, not defer, but I would admit that he had a kind of driving energy about imagery that I don't have""); a recap of Moore's checkered Utah/Berkeley/Yale/Los Angeles teaching career; a 1982 scan of the far-flung, foundering practice, the problem (as Moore once wrote of H.H. Richardson) ""of parlaying a limited amount of energy into a large and influential body of work."" In the book's second and lesser half, Littlejohn reviews Moore's work, segment by segment, with only a few photographs, relying on descriptions and evocations--which works better as a feature story than as criticism or analysis. In toto: the personality, the persona, the public figure--predominate over the work.

Pub Date: June 1, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1984

Categories: NONFICTION