Exhibition

  • Toward Making a Place: Charles Moore's House at Orinda
  • GRANTEE
    Charles W. Moore Foundation
    GRANT YEAR
    2009

Toward Making a Place: Charles Moore's House at Orinda will document and explore the tiny building and its vividly focused ideas that shaped Charles W. Moore's ensuing body of work. The exhibition, designed to be compact and flexible for varying exhibition spaces, will travel widely throughout the United States, and internationally. Like Orinda House itself, the exhibition will be layered, overlapping and connecting the tissues of Moore's words and drawings, overlaid with photographs and observations written by architects and historians from around the world. These layers will be dense enough to stimulate the most seasoned architects and students. Fully detailed models and an overall aim of accessibility will make this meaningful to the broader public, since so many aspects of this little, affordable house are especially relevant today.

Kevin Keim is the director of the Charles W. Moore Foundation. He is the author of An Architectural Life (Bulfinch Press); the editor of You Have to Pay for the Public Life (MIT Press); and the founder of PLACENOTES travel guides, which he designs and writes. His most recent book is A Grand Old Flag: A History of the United States through Its Flags, and Free To The People: How Philanthropy Shaped Where We Are (tentative title) is forthcoming.

Laura McGuire is a PhD candidate in architectural history at the University of Texas, at Austin.  She has spent several summers as a Moore Foundation intern. Her duties have included historic preservation research; docent training; collections and library cataloguing; and, most recently, a project digitizing the many tens of thousands of slides and images that document Charles Moore's career. McGuire will be a research assistant for the exhibition.

Adam Gates is an undergraduate architectural student at the University of Texas, at Austin. He will be responsible for developing a complete set of CAD drawings for the Orinda House, which he will then use to construct architectural models.

Donlyn Lyndon has been a member of the Charles Moore Foundation Board of Directors since its inception. Lyndon is professor emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley; author of numerous books; and a long–term collaborator of Charles Moore's. Lyndon will serve as a consultant and committee chair for the project.

Richard Whitaker is an educator and architect who was a partner of MLTW, the firm that coalesced as the Orinda House was first conceived. Whitaker will serve as an advisor to the project, helping to coordinate written contributions from colleagues and architects.

Ed Allen is the coauthor of The Architects Studio Companion, a technical and construction textbook that has become a standard in both university studios and professional offices. A student of Charles Moore's at Berkeley, Allen was involved in the development of working drawings of the house, along with later modifications. He will advise the exhibition project on all technical and construction–based aspects of Orinda House.

The Charles Moore Foundation, established in 1997, dedicates itself to Charles W. Moore's extraordinary legacy, not by seeking to mimic or reproduce his work and ideas, but to foster good and well–designed places, the environment, cities, and communities.  The foundation cares for the Moore/Andersson Compound in Austin, Texas.  Its programs include residencies, conferences, lectures, publication, student internships, advocacy, and care for Moore's archive and architectural library.