(b. October 31, 1925- December 16, 1993).

Charles Willard Moore was born in 1925 in Benton Harbor, Michigan.  A former school teacher, Moore’s mother recognized his gifts early on, and through encouragement in self-education and frequent trips across the United States, the young Moore developed a remarkable sense of place aided by a photographic memory.  Too young to serve in World War II, Moore spent those years as a student of architecture at the University of Michigan.  Upon graduation in 1947, Moore went to San Francisco, attracted by the European qualities of the city, and the legacy of the Bay Region Vernacular.  He apprenticed for several offices: Mario Corbett, Joseph Allen Stein, and Clark & Beuttler.  Moore was registered as an architect by his 21^st birthday. As a practicing architect much of his work was authored under the firm identification “MLTW”—Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull, Whitaker.  Between 1949 and 1950, Moore travelled throughout Europe and Northern Africa, where he watercolored, photographed, wrote and even made 16mm films of various architectural monuments.  Anticipating a draft notice in 1950, Charles Moore enlisted, trained and was sent to Seoul, Korea, serving as a lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers.  Some of his work included the design of simple structured such as school and chapels.  His trips on leave to Japan, however, would profoundly shape his work to come, after experiencing architectural and landscape works of tremendous spirit and subtlety.

Moore preferred conspicuous design features, including loud color combinations, supergraphics, stylistic collisions, the re-use of esoteric historical-design solutions, and the use of non- traditional materials such as plastic, PET film, platinum tiles, and neon signs.  Such design features made Moore one of the chief innovators of postmodern architecture, along with Robert Venturi and Michael Graves, among others.  Moore’s Piazza d’Italia (1978), an urban plaza in New Orleans, made prolific use of his exuberant design vocabulary and is frequently cited as the archetypical postmodern project.  Other projects include the Beverly Hills Civic Center in Beverly Hills, California (1992) and Sea Ranch a planned community in Sonoma County, California (1963).

Moore’s personal and professional archive was entrusted to the University of Texas at Austin Alexander Architectural Archive.  The massive collection documents Moore’s work in architecture, education, and scholarship.  The holdings include drawings models, manuscripts, notes, correspondence, and other papers.  The collection also includes tens of thousands of Moore’s 35mm travel slides.