Moore Better Building
What the Weekly’s esteemed architect might have thought of LEED.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
That postmodern architect Charles Moore was drawn to the water should come as no surprise. A quick bit of Google stalking reveals his Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton University focused on how the presence of water shapes the experience of place. It naturally flows, then, that Moore, famed for so many things – as the founder of the Yale Building Project and a dean of the Yale School of Architecture; as the architect of Sea Ranch; as a much-beloved teacher of fledgling architecture students; as the winner of the highest award given by the American Institute of Architects – was also drawn to the light. (There’s no sense in being by the water if there aren’t giant windows to invite nature’s glory inside.)
Moore isn’t around for us to ask him what he thinks of the LEED process; he died in 1993. But in a retrospective in the New York Times published a month after his passing, famed architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that Moore’s mission was to preach a gospel of kindness and common sense, but to add a serious streak of whimsy to his work. Thanks to LEED, the Weekly is a much more comfortable temperature. The colors on the building are bright and engaging, the light flows in and the lines of Moore’s work remain thought provoking. And you can even smell the ocean from here.
Comfort, color and nature – it’s everything that mattered to Moore. On all those accounts, he would likely be well pleased.
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