Ian Moore’s architectural production over the past 28 years has been driven by an optimism in the continuing validity and the inherent appropriateness of the ‘Modern House’ as the vehicle to develop an architectural language for the 21st century dwelling. A visit in 1986 to the Weissenhofseidlung in Stuttgart can be seen as a major influence on the development of the work together with the California Case Study house program, in particular the work of Craig Ellwood. Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, serves as an enduring model of the simplicity, rigour, transparency and relationship to its site. This is the starting point for the work. In this respect, the work is clearly not new or ground breaking, it is a development and reworking of principles and prototypes well known to the architectural profession. Adjustments are made to suit the individual circumstances of site, climate, new technology and changing lifestyles, yet principles remain the same. In each and every project there are three essential ingredients; SPACE, LIGHT and VENTILATION.These three ingredients inform the design process through an integration and layering of a series of architectural devices employed to enrich the inherent simplicity of the initial concepts and are employed with an economy of means which insists that each element added to the work must always perform more than one role. There is an overwhelming desire to discard the superfluous and to provide only that which is absolutely necessary. The work in not an exercise in academic theorising, it is about the act of building. The development of the work is a direct result of the evaluation of this experience.
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