Our Nation's Capital: Pro Bono Publico Ideas

Our Nation's Capital: Pro Bono Publico Ideas by Arthur Cotton Moore FAIA. thread_bound edition. ISBN: 9780692813447.

By Fred A. Bernstein December 14, 2017 http://www.archnewsnow.com/features/F... Arthur Cotton Moore is a sixth-generation Washingtonian with an intense love for the city, as well as an intense awareness of its faults. Since becoming an architect in 1965, he has followed two separate career paths: one, carrying out jobs for clients, including a major renovation of the Library of Congress; the other, proposing bold civic improvements. The latter preoccupation, Moore writes in his new book, Our Nation’s Capital: Pro Bono Publico Ideas (International Arts and Artists, 2017), compiled largely by his wife Patricia Moore, was carried out with “no clients, no compensation by money or favor, and no pursuit of architectural commissions.” In other words, nothing to rein in his fertile imagination. Some of the ideas seem impractical (he proposed moving the Supreme Court to an extension of the National Mall, in recognition of its importance to the tripartite system of government). Others would be ruinously expensive. But a few of Moore’s ideas were prescient: In 1982, he proposed building a broad stairway to connect the Kennedy Center to the Potomac River, from which it was entirely disconnected. A stairway is part of the Steven Holl-designed renovation of the Center currently under construction. (Moore also proposed covering the Center’s flat roof in solar panels; that hasn’t happened.)