Published in Interstices 24 (fall 2025), my essay, “Why Can’t Architecture Be More Like Water? Oceans, Lakes, Ponds, Fountains, Pools, Puddles, Droplets, Multiple-Meanings, Complements, Paradoxes, and Metaphors, 1957–1994,” points to water as an element capable of mobilizing sensory and transformative characteristics of architecture. The essay draws on noted American architect and teacher Charles W. Moore’s ongoing interest in water and architecture. Moore’s interest in water ran across his entire academic and professional careers, with a first version of Water and Architecture submitted as a doctoral thesis completed at Princeton University in 1957, and fountains and water designs included in many of Moore’s key architectural works. The dissertation was one amongst a number of moves designed to bring architecture into creative contact with its historical and regional legacies, legacies otherwise tempered by prevailing international modernist dictates. Backgrounding this account of “Why Can’t Architecture Be More Like Water?” is both an inauguration of the dissolve between history and architecture that came to inform American architectural postmodernism, but also a calling up of water as key to an experiential immediacy that fed into phenomenological approaches to analysis and design—a link recognized in the work of Gaston Bachelard, specifically Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. This essay reminds us of that which is difficult to pin down, the at times paradoxical, but complementary attributes of water that compelled Moore to find in it defining “metaphors for architecture” itself. (Extracted from the introductory editorial to Interstices 24, by Simon Twose, Jeanette Budgett, and Andrew Douglas)
Martin Schwartz is an architect and teacher with an interest in daylight in architecture.
Interstices: Full Published Work
See my essays and video lectures at Academia.edu