In 1965 the architect Charles Moore slyly diverted a report on Californian architecture, commissioned by the Yale architecture journal Perspecta, into an unexpected and expansive critique of American public space. “You Have to Pay for the Public Life” was about public space and how it was changing in character, function, and meaning, and about much more besides, and it has become a mainstay of graduate school reading lists ever since. 1 It continues to provide the best short guide to the Californian built environment of the mid-20th century, and to multiple contemporary debates and styles, notably the evolving, eclectic, timber-based Bay Region Style, of which Moore was a practitioner. As part of the firm MLTW, the architect was then working on the first phase of Sea Ranch, the community of vacation homes rising on the coast of Sonoma County. The Sea Ranch would soon become a global design icon for its fusion of modernism with vernacular building, and its reconciliation of the ecological thinking of Lawrence Halprin with the adventurous property development of Al Boeke. 2

Although the concept of the “postmodern” was not yet current, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life” anticipated the emerging movement, ranging freely across styles and periods and showing none of the devout allegiance to orthodox modernism then typical in the discipline. At the Sea Ranch that same sense of fullness was made manifest. The early buildings were spare in their modernist silhouettes but redolent of preindustrial barns; the interiors were animated with exuberant super-graphics and the spaces were more attuned to emotional affect and the movement of human beings than to any strict interpretation of functionalism. 3 Sea Ranch was urbane in its density and footprint, yet immersed in nature. And it raised vexing questions: Was the Sea Ranch public or private space, or both, or more perturbingly, a private version of a public space?

Charles Moore, ca. mid 1970s.
Charles Moore, ca. mid 1970s. © Charles Moore Foundation

...

“You Have to Pay for the Public Life” (1965) by Charles Moore

This issue of Perspecta considers monumental architecture as part of the urban scene. I was asked to ferret out some on the West Coast, especially in California. Perspecta’s editors suspected, I presume, that I would discover that in California there is no contemporary monumental architecture, or that there is no urban scene (except in a sector of San Francisco), or more probably, that both monumental architecture and the urban scene are missing. Their suspicions were well founded; any discussion from California in 1964 about monumental urban architecture (as it is coming to exist, for instance, in New Haven) is bound to be less about what we have than about what we have instead.

Any discussion of monumental architecture in its urban setting should proceed from a definition of (or, if you prefer, an airing of prejudice about) what constitutes “monumental,” and what “urban” means to us. The two adjectives are closely related: both of them involve the individual’s giving up something, space or money or prominence or concern, to the public realm.

Monumentality, I take it, has to do with monuments. And a monument is an object whose function is to mark a place, either at that place’s boundary or at its heart. There are, of course, private monuments, over such places as the graves of the obscure, but to merit our attention here, and to be of any interest to most of the people who view it, a monument must make a place of more than private importance or interest. The act of marking is then a public act, and the act of recognition an expectable public act among the members of the society that possesses the place. Monumentality, considered this way, is not a product of compositional techniques (such as symmetry about several axes), of flamboyance of form, or even of conspicuous consumption of space, time, or money. It is, rather, a function of the society’s taking possession of or agreeing upon extraordinarily important places on the earth’s surface, and of the society’s celebrating their preeminence. ...