In 1959, Moore left
Princeton to take a teaching position at the
University of California, Berkeley. There he teamed with Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull Jr. and
Richard Whittaker to form a new and influential firm: MLTW. They were among the first American architects to favor contextual designs—fitting well with the urban fabric of San Francisco—over harsh Modernist buildings that were alien to the texture of the city. When hired to design an innovative, environmentally sensitive condominium complex on the north coast, they applied some of their sensitivity to "place" to the project.
Sea Ranch became one of the most admired, influential, and beloved works of the late twentieth century. Moore rose to become chairman and professor of architecture at Berkeley in five years. His work was featured in the seminal "Forty Under Forty" exhibition at New York's Architectural League that established the "Whites and the Grays" as competing camps of avant garde designers. Curated by
Robert A.M. Stern, the show eventually became a book in 1969. When
Paul Rudolph resigned as Dean of the
Yale School of Architecture, a nationwide search finally settled on Moore as his successor in 1965. As Stern observed in his history of the school, Moore was an energetic though often controversial leader who managed to steer the program through some of its most tumultuous, but also creative years. He served in that capacity for five years, leaving in 1970. With
Kent Bloomer, Moore founded the
Yale Building Project in 1967 as a way both to demonstrate
social responsibility and demystify the construction process for first-year
students. He also pushed Yale president
Kingman Brewster to hold a competition for a new mathematics building on the historic campus. The results of the contest were divisive, since Moore was seen as a champion of the winning architect,
Robert Venturi. Many of Moore's students became leading architects of the next generation, including Mark Simon, Buzz Yudell, Gerald Allen,
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk,
Andrés Duany, David Sellers, and Turner Brooks. An innovator in practice who often held design "charettes" to gain insights from clients, Moore also pioneered multi-partner, "suitcase" firms with his former students: Centerbrook Architects (Connecticut), Moore Ruble Yudell (Los Angeles) and Moore/Andersson (Austin, Texas). The constant changes resulted, in part, from Moore's extensive worldwide travel and his moves to
California and then to
Austin, Texas. While at Yale Moore wrote a useful residential design book:
The Place of Houses. Clients and designers loved its easy going style and beautiful drawings, but especially its commitment to "placemaking." With Donlyn Lyndon, Moore also founded the journal
Places in Berkeley to expound ideas about the
genius loci. He continued to write essays and books for the remainder of his career, including the influential "You Have To Pay for the Public Life," in
Perspecta, one of the first predictors of suburban sprawl and the rise of the theme park in America. In 1975, Moore moved to the
University of California, Los Angeles where he continued teaching. Finally, in 1985, he became the O'Neil Ford Centennial Professor of Architecture at the
University of Texas at Austin. He died at home of a heart attack on December 16, 1993. One of his last books,
Body, Memory and Architecture, not only introduced new psychological and anthropological ideas into design theory, it also anticipated today's revolution in neuroscience, and the theory of "embodied cognition." ==Buildings and legacy==