Architect Peter Meinhard Moro, CBE FRIBA was born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1911. Moro immigrated to England in 1936, settling in London. As a teacher at the Regent Street Polytechnic he established a reputation as someone who knew how to teach architecture in a modern way. He was appointed Chief Architectural Designer of the Royal Festival Hall in 1948 and in 1952 founded his own practice, Peter Moro and Partners, which was responsible for many notable public buildings in Hull, London, Nottingham and Plymouth.
Architect Peter Moro was born on 27 May 1911 to Margareta Hönigswald and renowned Austrian physician and paediatrician Professor Ernst Moro in Heidelberg, Germany. He began his training as an architect at Stuttgart University in 1929, moving to Berlin a year later to study at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Technical Academy. Despite being raised as a Catholic, he was forced to leave the Academy because of his Jewish ancestry (his maternal great grandmother had been born Jewish and converted to Catholicism), choosing to complete his final two years at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, where he studied under the architect Otto Salvisberg. Moro graduated in 1936 and feeling he had no future in Germany, immigrated to England with no money and little English.
He settled in London, on the understanding that he had been promised a job by German émigré architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, Walter Gropius, but after it transpired that Gropius had no openings, within a few days Moro was offered alternative employment at Tecton by Russian émigré Berthold Lubetkin, whom he later described as ‘by far the most interesting architect I ever worked with’. There, he worked on Highpoint II, a modernist apartment block in Highgate, north London including the living room of Lubetkin's own penthouse. Through Lubetkin, Moro came into contact with the influential Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS), created in 1933 as a forum for cultural exchange and disbanded in 1957; its other members included László Moholy-Nagy, Ernö Goldfinger and Serge Chermayeff, as well as Gropius. With Moholy-Nagy's permission Moro designed the entrance screen for an exhibition of the MARS group at the Burlington Galleries in London in 1938. Later that year, Moro and his Brunswick Square housemate, Richard (later Lord) Llewelyn-Davies, then still a student at the Architectural Association, were commissioned to build Harbour Meadow at Birdham, Sussex. Now Grade II listed, it is one of the least known but most original modern houses of the 1930s in the UK.
Shortly after its completion, Moro was interned as an 'enemy alien' at Kempton race course in 1940, before being transferred to a camp in Douglas on the Isle of Man (most likely Hutchinson Camp though records cannot confirm this as yet), an experience alleviated by the lectures given by German art and architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, one of a number of 'interesting and quite famous people' including a member of the Amadeus quartet and Viennese pianist Walter Landauer who Moro met there (Peter Moro, Architect's Lives, National Life Story Collection, 1996). He was released in 1941 and after returning to London, began to teach at the Regent Street Polytechnic, establishing a reputation for teaching architecture in a modern way. Students from his class were drafted into the design team for the Royal Festival Hall, for which Moro was appointed Chief Architectural Designer in 1948, the same year in which he was made a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Working under Robert Matthew, along with Leslie Martin and Edwin Williams, Moro completed the Festival Hall project in 1951 to great acclaim. Although the exteriors were altered in 1962 the interiors still show his care and wit in detailing. In 1952 he founded his own architectural practice, Peter Moro and Partners, designing Fairlawn Primary School, Lewisham in 1957, as well as his own house at 20, Blackheath Park, in south London, a pavilion with a raised living floor and one of the first post-war buildings to be listed. The practice also designed public housing for the Greater London Council and the London Borough of Southwark. In 1964, Moro completed his first theatre, The Playhouse, Nottingham, one of the earliest theatres to be adaptable either as a proscenium stage or as a thrust stage (‘peninsular’), projecting forward. 'The theatre forms two sides of a paved pedestrian square, with a festive and ceremonial atmosphere inside for the audience 'front of house', equivalent to the Festival Hall in intention and freedom of circulation, but achieved with the new vocabulary of rough concrete and cast metal reliefs by Geoffrey Clarke' (Alan Powers, Peter Moro Obituary, The Independent, 1998). He also designed theatres at Hull University, the Theatre Royal, Plymouth (1982) with an adaptable auditorium, and three theatres at the Academy of Performing Arts, Hong Kong (1983–85). Moro rejected criticisms of modern architecture, feeling that 'the banality of functionalism' could, as he repeatedly demonstrated, be overcome by the imaginative and technically skilful transformation of the ordinary. He was appointed a CBE in 1977 and in 1984 Peter Moro and Partners was dissolved. Peter Moro died in London in 1998.