The Architecture, Culture & Tectonics Research Group warmly invites you
to attend their Wednesday Seminar on 1st December at 13.00pm
“Charles W. Moore: A Self-Portrait in Three Houses”
Guest Speaker: Richard W. Hayes
Abstract
Postmodern architect Charles W. Moore explored to an unparalleled degree the architect’s own house as a design challenge, building eight residences for himself during a career that spanned four decades. In so doing, he joined a small number of architects, including Sir John Soane, Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson, whose own houses are among their most important achievements.
In this talk, architectural historian Richard W. Hayes focuses on three of Moore’s eight houses to delineate a portrayal of the designer. As experimental works, the houses evince Moore’s interest in the role of memory, the importance of the sensing body, and contrasts between high art and pop culture. Ranging from restrained modernism to exuberant postmodernism, these designs illustrate how Moore gave built expression to his scholarly and research interests. By creating vivid and distinctive houses for himself, Moore left a lasting self-portrait of an incisive architectural mind at work—and at play.
Biography
Richard W. Hayes is an architect and architectural historian educated at Columbia and Yale. His publications include The Yale Building Project: The First 40 Years (Yale University Press, 2007), a comprehensive history of an influential educational programme. Hayes has also published extensively on the Aesthetic Movement in nineteenth-century Britain, including a chapter in E.W. Godwin: Aesthetic Movement Architect and Designer (Yale University Press, 1999), edited by Susan Weber Soros. The book received numerous awards and was selected as ‘one of the most notable books of the year’ by the New York Times. Since then, Hayes has published six additional articles on Godwin in peer-reviewed volumes.
In a career combining practice and research, Hayes has received grants and awards from the American Institute of Architects, the American Architectural Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, New York State Council on the Arts, the European Architectural History Network, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. A Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 2009 and 2013, he is now a life member of Clare Hall.