Robert A.M. Stern, founder of his eponymous firm and dean of the Yale School of Architecture, remembers his colleague and friend Charles Moore in this article originally published by Metropolis Magazine. Stern writes about the details most would never know — including what it was like to be a guest in Moore's home and his eating habits. Read on to learn about and their relationship over the years and Stern's admiration for Moore.
As an architecture student at Yale editing Perspecta 9/10, I first met Charles Moore by telephone and through correspondence. I had come across his amazing early projects in the Italian magazine Casabella, and was intrigued by what I read about him and his partners — especially in a provocative essay by Donlyn Lyndon. I got in touch with Charles and he volunteered that he was interested in writing about Disneyland for the journal, leading to the publication of his justifiably famous article, "You Have to Pay for the Public Life," as well as a portfolio of projects by his firm Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull, Whitaker.
I liked Charles's work from the very start, in particular his house in Orinda, California, with its two aedicules that were like two of Kahn's Trenton bathhouses reinterpreted inside a larger third volume. But the Moore project that perhaps has had the most enduring impact on me was his unrealized design for a condominium in Coronado, California; instead of being either a point tower or a slab — such as virtually all high-density multifamily residential was in those days — it was a hybrid, with a wonderful domesticity about it: it didn't look like an office building with people sleeping in it. Instead, it looked like what it was — an apartment house.
