Charles W. Moore; Influential Architect

Charles Moore, who fought abstraction in architecture, contending that his fellow builders had failed to create environments that give people a sense of place, has died.

A spokesman for his Santa Monica-based firm said Moore, 68, died Thursday in Austin, Tex., of a heart attack. He was chairman of the architecture department at the University of Texas and had previously been chairman of the architecture department at UCLA. He also had taught at Yale, Princeton and UC Berkeley.

Honored by the American Institute of Architects in 1990 with a gold medal, the group’s highest honor, the balding, cherubic-looking Moore first became known nationally in the early 1960s for his Sea Ranch Condominium project on a rugged stretch of coast near the mouth of the Russian River north of San Francisco.

David Littlejohn, in his biography of Moore, called the project “the most written about, most influential American building of its decade.”

“A strong case could be made that the writings and teachings of Charles Willard Moore . . . have formed the single most important positive influence in shaping new attitudes in architectural design in this country in the last 20 years.”

Sea Ranch--with its redwood-adorned homes seemingly becoming part of the coastal cliffs--won AIA honors in 1967, while his other national awards from the group included designs for St. Matthew’s Church in Pacific Palisades, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and Berlin’s Tegel Harbor housing.

Some of his other projects were the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, the Gethsemane Cathedral in Fargo, N.D., the Beverly Hills Civic Center with its ornate public library, the 2,300-foot Wonderwall of corrugated sheet metal painted in all the colors of the rainbow for the 1984 New Orleans World Exposition, and the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Perhaps his most controversial and publicly discussed project was the Plaza d’Italia, an outdoor meeting place for New Orleans residents of Italian descent.

Its colonnades, neon arches and fountains were to have surrounded a restaurant that never was built.

“Delicatessen order” with classical motif, Moore mused.

Moore’s early years were spent teaching at the University of Utah and at Princeton, where he earned a doctoral degree. He began teaching at Berkeley and Yale before moving to UCLA, where he was architectural department chairman from 1976 to 1984.

His books include “The Place of Houses,” “Body Memory and Architecture,” “Los Angeles: The City Observed,” “Dimensions” and “The Poetics of Gardens.”

In 1989, Leon Whiteson, The Times’ architecture critic, wrote that “provocative utterances characterize the 63-year-old Post Modernist guru’s quick eccentric mind. His freedom from received ideas made him one of the first architects to challenge Modernism at the height of its stylistic dominance in the 1960s.”

Moore spoke more simply of himself:

“To make a place,” he said in an interview with Whiteson, “is to make a domain that helps people know where they are, and by extension, know who they are.”

Survivors include two sisters, as well as nieces and nephews.