Building a Legacy

Expect to meet a revolutionary in Thom Mayne’s Santa
Monica office of Morphosis Architecture.

There’s nothing strange on the surface of this office
““ some interns ordering a $5 pizza, phones ringing off the
hook, and cars piled up in the parking lot. Critics may call Mayne,
architectural maverick and UCLA architecture professor, the
“bad boy of architecture,” but he doesn’t see it
that way.

Mayne, who received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in May,
currently has some of his works and projects on display at
UCLA’s Perloff Hall gallery through Nov. 10, including his
winning design for an Olympic Village in New York City.

Since architecture is not covered by the Nobel Foundation, the
Pritzker was established by the Hyatt Foundation in 1979 to
acknowledge architects with innovative talent who have made
significant humanitarian contributions.

“It’s basically the Nobel Prize of
architecture,” said fellow architecture and urban design
Professor Richard Weinstein. “Thom definitely deserved
it.”

As the first American to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize
in 14 years, Mayne has achieved a rare honor. He was in a cab in
New York when he received the call that he had won.

“I was speechless,” Mayne said.

But he did not always care for architecture. After moving from
the East Coast to Whittier as a child, Mayne said there just was no
significant architecture to speak of.

But in high school he entered an architecture competition as a
fluke and won.

“I grew up as a city kid, not an athlete, not a
joiner,” he said.

Mayne soon became familiar with success, which he attributes at
least partly to his tenacity.

“I’m not a person that goes with the flow a lot of
times. In this culture, if you’re independent and you express
your independence, you become labeled as a “˜bad boy.’
It becomes a way of marginalizing you,” Mayne said.

Designing Caltrans District 7 Headquarters and the Science
Center School, both in Los Angeles, winning 54 American Institute
of Architects awards, 25 Progressive Architecture Awards, and many
others, Mayne may seem far from the margins.

But his edgy designs are what brought him to the forefront in
the first place.

In the film “Orange County,” Mayne’s design of
a metallic, canyon-like institution became Diamond Ranch High
School, where Colin Hanks and his buddies planned their next
surfing escapade.

Pritzker juror Victoria Newhouse considers this project the
benchmark of Mayne’s work. Since then, Mayne’s
architecture has indeed become a new breed, not derived from main
lines of architecture within the past century.

To push boundaries in one’s work, Mayne stressed the
importance of optimism.

“I believe in the potential of a human being. I’m an
activist. Maybe that’s why they call me a “˜bad
boy.'”

Rather than simply bowing to the commands of his clients, Mayne
considers himself an active participant in the design of his
projects.

Now associated with three of the main Southern California
architectural schools ““ UCLA, the Southern California
Institute of Architecture and USC ““ Mayne has fought hard to
promote architecture that instigates change and that will benefit
Los Angeles.

Mayne is not an idealist, and recognizes that architecture is
often driven by capital.

But he said that Los Angeles is a young, modern city that is
perfect for experimentation because it is still in the process of
developing a more public, interactive architecture.