Meet Architect Joeb Moore
Joeb Moore shares influences that contribute to his ecologically aware designs.
Photography by Dave Sundberg/ESTO
Stone Acres Farm, Bridge House, T(EA)House are some of the projects conceived by Greenwich architectural and design firm Joeb Moore & Partners. Winner of more than 60 national, regional and state architectural design awards, Moore commutes from his lakeside midcentury modern house in Stamford to his Greenwich office and to teaching posts at Yale and Barnard.
The idyllic lake, woods, rocks, islands, caves and cliffs surrounding his Westchester boyhood home still inform Joeb Moore’s philosophy and designs. Embracing ecological thinking, he masterminds projects where land, climate, plants, architecture and landscape work together, responding to the environment and ecologies of place. Recognizing the discord between “house” and “home,” his firm tackles the challenges of dwelling and the search for connection and meaning—seeing a structure not so much as a place but as a journey through time and culture, “a search for homecoming that confronts us with a deeper understanding of ourselves, the world and others.”
Photography by Paul Joseph
1. What artwork influences you?
In Marfa, TX, Donald Judd has filled a warehouse with polished boxes with different angles and reposes that reflect the buildings seen outside, so the micro and macro interact, expanding ideas about the interdependence and relationships of art, landscape and architecture.
2. What building materials do you favor using?
I like to work with materials and textures that contrast—concrete next to a soft wood or an abstract stucco plane against a deteriorated aged garden wood wall.
Photography by JM&P
3. What is a go-to teaching tool?
A sectional model is a powerful tool to help students understand that every building’s design should speak to us of who we are and who we might become. A building that gives form to the future and the past.
4. What is a place that transports and moves you?
At the Noguchi Museum, a garden combines landscape, art and architecture into a social and meditative space.
Site Plan by JM&P with Reed Hildebrand
5. What is a primary feature of the Stone Acres Farm framework plan?
The key concept was to re-energize and amplify the historic Pentway cattle path as the organizing and spatial path that would reveal the past, present and future, both culturally and environmentally of the farmstead campus.
Courtesy of the Moma design store
6. What is a favorite furniture design?
Noguchi’s Akari lights—they are luminous and delicate. I like to bring out their lightness by contrasting them with something weighty.
