"The main premise of this book," Charles Moore wrote with Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon introducing The Place of Houses, "is that anyone who cares enough can create a house of great worth - no anointment is required. If you care enough you just do it. You bind the goods and trappings of your life together with your dreams to make a place that is uniquely your own. In doing so you build a semblance of the world you know, adding it to the community that surrounds you."

That houses should create a center for those who inhabit it seemed obvious enough, but Moore often pointed out that houses should, at the same time, be instruments of connection. This second part has been, in most cases everywhere blithely liquidated, as houses have, by and large, become instruments of isolation. This has confounded most attempts at making places that have any chance for nurturing a community.

When Charles Moore accepted an invitation in 1984 to come to Austin and develop a new graduate program at the University of Texas, it became another

 

opportunity to develop yet another architectural practice. Like those that preceded this one - MLTW, MLTW:Moore/Turnbull, Moore Grover Harper, Centerbrook, Urban Innovations Group, and Moore Ruble Yudell - what would ultimately become Moore/Andersson Architects began with the act of making a house, the seventh that Moore would design for himself. The place would center Moore's hectic life and work, but connect the work to the sense of being in one of Austin's prized neighborhoods (Tarrytown), the larger sense of the Hill Country, and the even larger sense of Texas itself.

Moore and the partner in this venture, architect Arthur Andersson, arrived to a neighborhood that had been traumatized by construction of MoPAC, a state freeway that was promoted by politicians and transportation authorities as a "boulevard" but lamentably devolved into a standard concrete high-speed corridor with nary a tree, sidewalk, or intersection in site, let alone any of the charm or prestige or romance that "boulevard" calls to mind. Although Moore's site was directly adjacent to the