Charles Moore House

This paper is a study of a house designed by one of the leading postmodernist architects in America, Charles W. Moore. Moore established his reputation with striking and fanciful designs that both blend his constructions into the landscape and separate them out in astonishing ways. His designs for the Sea Ranch condominium remain among the most interesting uses of space and structure, but his conception for a single-family dwelling best personifies Moore's contributions to the direction of American architecture in the latter half of the 20th century. With the Klotz House, designed and built between 1967 and 1970 in Westerley, Rhode Island, Moore offered his own distinctively arresting answers to some of modern architecture's most intriguing questions. The Klotz House stands as a fascinating example of late 1960s postmodernist architectural thinking, yet it also exudes the timeless appeal of a classic design.

Wayne Andrews writes, "Charles Willard Moore, a native of Benton Harbor, Michigan, has staged one commanding appearance after another in California in recent years" (286). Robert A. M. Stern describes the project that first made Moore's mark in the architectural community:

[Sea Ranch was] a series of crotchety shacklike cottages akin to the indigenous architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region, yet revealing a disciplined geometry quite unlike that area's usual random character (70-71).

In the Sea Ranch project, Moore created structures that echoed the weathe

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as he continued to talk with the Klotz family and work on creating a liveable, flowing space. Andrews offers his own description of Moore's working methods: He learned to design houses much as Shaw did plays: Shaw professed never to know the ending of a play he was beginning. In this free spirit, Moore conceived . . . a frame dwelling that may be forever waiting for the last act (286). In the "second act" of the Klotz House, Moore's design expands the complexity of the ground floor, adding appendages which eventually became a garage and studio apartment connected to the main structure by an open breezeway. The house as built retains much of the flavor of the first-draft plans but sacrifices a substantial measure of its original geometric purity of line. Moore had to make one of the more interesting adjustments to the project to accommodate a central construction flaw, the gap between two-dimensional design and three-dimensional realization. The architect enlisted some of his students at Yale to begin construction on the central stone fireplace that forms the spine of the house. They were unable to complete construction before the end of the term, however, and a professional stonemason came in to finish the t

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