The trigger was pulmonary fibrosis, mentioned his spouse, Patricia Moore.

A sixth-generation Washingtonian, Mr. Moore established his agency, Arthur Cotton Moore/Associates, in 1965 and over the subsequent half-century grew to become one of many preeminent architects within the capital, overseeing greater than $1 billion in workplace buildings alone. “I want I had designed as a lot of my city as he has,” Hugh Newell Jacobsen, one other of town’s main architects, advised The Washington Put up in 1981.

Arthur Cotton Moore’s Designs on Washington

Within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, Mr. Moore served as a consulting architect on an $81.5 million renovation of the Thomas Jefferson Constructing, the centerpiece of the Library of Congress, which reopened after the work in 1997. Dropped ceilings have been eliminated to disclose long-forgotten work. Art work was scrubbed of years of mud and buildup. Stained glass and mosaics have been restored. Structural modifications introduced the cavernous constructing — which Mr. Moore mentioned had solely two hearth extinguishers — at lengthy last as long as security codes.

Lauding the “dazzling restoration,” New York Instances structure critic Herbert Muschamp wrote that guests to the newly refurbished library discovered themselves in a “place of radiance.”

Earlier, Mr. Moore helped rescue the Outdated Put up Workplace on Pennsylvania Avenue NW from demolition. He performed a number one function within the renovation of that constructing in addition to the Phillips Assortment, the personal artwork museum in Dupont Circle the place work had as soon as been saved within the toilet for lack of house, in addition to the Cairo, the condo constructing on Q Avenue NW that’s the tallest residential construction in Washington.

In these tasks, Mr. Moore displayed a reverence for historical past that endeared him to preservationists and advocates for conventional design.

On the Outdated Put up Workplace, his “intervention didn’t take away from the character of the unique constructing,” Dhiru A. Thadani, a Washington-based architect and urbanist, mentioned in an interview. On the Jefferson constructing, Thadani added, “it’s nearly such as you don’t know he was there.”

“We would all be grateful that Arthur Cotton Moore has humanely preserved the perfect of Washington,” Michael Curtis, the writer of the guide “Classical Structure and Monuments of Washington, D.C.,” wrote in an e mail.

In his personal designs, Mr. Moore was extra exuberant, difficult the Washington aesthetic that appeared to carry, he wrote, that “good structure is only a utilitarian constructing whose best virtues are creating wealth and never leaking.” Town, as he noticed it, was filled with boxy constructions erected to deal with town’s legal professionals, lobbyists and “green-shaded bureaucrats.” Even the Kennedy Middle, he advised Washingtonian journal, was “like a Whitman Sampler, with toothpicklike columns.”

Mr. Moore sought to confer on town’s structure a touch of lightness, even whimsy, along with his signature curvaceous, futuristic kinds. His design for the outdated Rizik’s trend boutique on Connecticut Avenue NW, with its undulating traces, exemplified the type he referred to as “Industrial Baroque.”

“Individuals are bored with countless grid-crunching,” he advised the Instances in 1990. “Baroque offers with fashionable design’s concern and loathing of the curve — simply what I believe is lacking in fashionable design.”

Mr. Moore’s most famous design was Washington Harbour, a $200 million advanced located alongside the banks of the Potomac River in Georgetown. Within the Nineteen Sixties, he had undertaken the restoration of close by Canal Sq., a Nineteenth-century warehouse that he transformed into retail and workplace house, marking the start of his decades-long effort to remodel the neighborhood.

For a few years, the Georgetown waterfront was hardly a vacation spot. It included a concrete plant and a car parking zone for impounded automobiles. Throughout one interval in its historical past, a stench emanated from a constructing used for animal rendering. “In the future they tried to enhance the scent by dumping chocolate into the factor,” Mr. Moore advised The Put up, “and there was a scent of rancid chocolate throughout Georgetown.”

But he noticed the potential for a brand new Washington landmark — a mix of luxurious condominiums, eating places, workplace house and shops with a promenade alongside the water. After years of battles with Georgetown neighborhood activists who argued for extra park and public house, Washington Harbour opened in 1986.

The undertaking was not universally fashionable. Writing within the Instances, structure critic Paul Goldberger described it as “a very busy cacophony of curves and arches and turrets and columns and domes and bay home windows.”

“As a piece of structure Washington Harbour appears like a contemporary constructing trapped in a postmodern girdle,” he wrote. “Its elements appear to conflict intensely, and the advanced has neither the integrity of a very classical construction nor that of a very fashionable one. It’s ponderous and graceless, a reminder that industrial structure in Washington remains to be years behind the instances.”

Mr. Moore was undeterred by the criticism.

“I used to be effectively conscious,” he wrote shortly after Washington Harbour opened, “that whereas nobody has ever been pilloried for producing a boring constructing in Washington, the buildings most beloved right here, such because the Cairo, the Outdated Put up Workplace, the Smithsonian Citadel and the Library of Congress … all obtained horrible evaluations by architectural critics at their openings.”

Many years later, as individuals continued to collect and dine on the waterfront, he appeared to contemplate his imaginative and prescient fulfilled, a minimum of partly.

“Earlier than Washington Harbour, individuals didn’t even understand they have been residing on a river,” Mr. Moore advised Washingtonian in 2005. “The Potomac wasn’t a part of the collective consciousness.”

On the Waterfront, Calm After the Storms

Arthur Cotton Moore was born April 12, 1935, and grew up in a Victorian home within the Kalorama neighborhood that was later destroyed to accommodate the Chinese language embassy. His father was a Navy captain, and his mom was a homemaker.

After graduating from the personal St. Albans College in 1954, Mr. Moore enrolled at Princeton College — partly to keep away from the Naval Academy, he mentioned. His freshman 12 months, he signed up for a category in architectural drawing.

“What hooked me was the concept of constructing your drawings come to life,” he advised The Put up. “I discover nice pleasure in truly seeing my squiggles on paper constructed. The one true award in structure is when a whole bunch of individuals make your buildings actual.”

He obtained a bachelor’s diploma in 1958 and a grasp’s diploma in 1960, each in structure.

His marriage to Yolanda Andrea Clapp resulted in divorce.

Survivors embrace his spouse of almost six a long time, the previous Patricia Stefan of Washington; a son from his first marriage, Gregory W. Moore of Highland Park, N.J.; a sister; a brother; and a grandson.

Mr. Moore and his spouse lived for a interval in Talbot County, on Maryland’s Jap Shore, in a chrome steel mansion of Mr. Moore’s design. In recent times, that they had resided in a penthouse condo on the Watergate constructing alongside the Potomac.

Along with his architectural work, Mr. Moore was painter, a furnishings maker and a novelist. He was the writer of books together with “Interruption of the Cocktail Hour: A Washington Yarn of Artwork, Homicide, and the Tried Assassination of the President,” in addition to “The Powers of Preservation: New Life for City Historic Locations” and “Our Nation’s Capital: Professional Bono Publico Concepts.”

The latter guide, printed in 2017, detailed his imaginative and prescient for tasks that he hoped would possibly someday come to fruition in Washington: a staircase linking the Kennedy Middle’s terrace to the Potomac River; a ferry connecting the Kennedy Middle, Washington Harbour and Rosslyn, Va.; an expanded Nationwide Mall with underground parking; even open-air artwork and guide stands alongside the imposing sides of the FBI headquarters.

“They’d fold up at night time,” he urged, “like Parisian bookstalls.”

Amongst his ultimate inventive tasks, his spouse mentioned, was a chrome steel sculpture of a tree, its gleaming branches curved as if bending within the wind. The work can be put in later this month, she mentioned, at his grave in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown.