Photo © Moore Ruble Yudell

Moore Ruble Yudell enlightens a vast body of work with social values and sustainability

By Sarah Amelar

According to Charles Moore’s biological clock, he needed to start a new firm every 10 years. But he kept ties all across the country, and the different practices became an ‘extended family,’ ” recalls Buzz Yudell, FAIA, a founding partner of Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners (MRY), recipient of the 2006 AIA Firm Award. “Charles always liked launching small practices with protégés, often partnering with his former students,” adds John Ruble, FAIA, “but when the offices got big, he moved on.”

Before joining Moore to found MRY in Los Angeles in 1977, Yudell and Ruble studied under him: Yudell at Yale, while Moore was its dean of architecture (1965–70), and Ruble at UCLA, where Moore headed the architecture and urban design programs in the late ’70s. Although MRY began modestly, designing a private Los Angeles home—Rodes House [RECORD, mid-May 1981, page 126]—larger commissions soon followed, establishing the firm’s talent for juggling an impressive variety of building types, programs, and venues.

	• 2006 Honor Awards index • Architecture Awards • Interiors Awards • Urban Design • 25 Year Award • Firm Award • Gold Medal Award

In 1979, the team began designing St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, in Pacific Palisades, California—the first of MRY’s many cultural, religious, and institutional projects—and in 1980 won a design competition for Berlin’s Tegel Harbor Housing. This commission propelled the firm into an international arena, taking it from a six- to a 15-person practice, now up to 60 (a trend that perhaps prompted Moore’s flight, in 1985, to Texas, where he started a small firm while remaining an MRY partner until his death, in 1993).

Though Moore’s work had been known for its bold colors, supergraphics, and mix of historical and pop references, MRY as a team has tended toward a subtler, more contextual, even vernacular sensibility. The practice’s strong ongoing themes—centering on sustainability, affordable housing, and community involvement—emerged early on. Such concerns can be traced to the 1960s and ’70s, when Moore began actively encouraging students to take on social issues.

With St. Matthew’s Church, MRY first applied Jim Burns’s and Lawrence Halprin’s “Take-Part” planning process. The idea was to engage the community in workshops or charrettes, getting all relevant parties (including a project’s future users) to help shape the key ideas, rather than positioning architects opposite “client/critics.” Though this approach is common now, Yudell says, “people were skeptical of it then, suggesting that architects were either pandering to the community or abdicating their responsibility to it.” But at St. Matthew’s, he adds, “many congregants said, in the end, the process had helped heal the wounds of a divided parish.” Although the partners do not consider this method suitable for every project, they continue to find it valuable. “That way, you get to see the contradictions early on,” observes Ruble. “Nothing is held back.”

Other lessons came to MRY from Ruble’s days, at the outset of his career, as a Peace Corps architect and planner in Tunisia. There, he saw economically, culturally, and environmentally attuned responses to energy conservation—and, he says, really began to understand the importance of place in design.

Those values are particularly apparent in such projects as Tango housing, which MRY built in partnership with SWECO FFNS Arkitekter AB for the 2001 housing exposition in Malmö, Sweden. Tango’s forms subtly evoke the country’s Modernist traditions, while the brilliant hues (fine-tuned by MRY’s color expert Tina Beebe) allude to Swedish fishing villages. Rooftop photovoltaic panels, surrounded by insulating grasses, convert solar energy into heat, while the self-sufficient project’s wind turbine plant generates electricity. Each apartment, unique in its design, has its own “intelligent wall” system, controlling everything from room temperatures to door locks. And a community garden, lush with marsh vegetation, forms the heart of the complex.

Through public and private housing in Europe, Australia, Asia, and the United States, the firm continues to investigate sustainability, density, urban infill, affordability, and income integration. Still building single-family homes, MRY aspires to translate a sense of intimacy and individuality into the multifamily work. While planning entire towns and urban sectors, the firm has also tackled educational projects ranging from elementary schools to campus planning and university buildings for performing arts, sciences, and business studies. MRY’s federal structures have included a 2004 courthouse in Fresno, California, and an embassy, under construction in Berlin. As Ruble says, “We’ll take on virtually every building type but hospitals and airports.”

Twenty-nine years after its founding, the practice has grown exponentially, with many award-winning projects to its credit. True to the firm’s original ideals, the partners still aspire to the spirit of collaboration—within MRY and beyond.

2006 Honor Awards index | Architecture Awards | Interiors Awards
Urban Design | 25 Year Award | Firm Award | Gold Medal Award