Thom Mayne
Thom Mayne
Thom Mayneis an American architect. He is based in Los Angeles. Mayne helped found the Southern California Institute of Architecturein 1972, where he is a trustee. Since then he has held teaching positions at SCI-Arc, the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and the University of California, Los Angeles. He is principal of Morphosis, an architectural firm in Santa Monica, California. Mayne received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in March 2005...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArchitect
Date of Birth19 January 1944
CountryUnited States of America
Thom Mayne quotes about
Our idea of nature is increasingly being determined by scientific developments. And they have become decisive for our image of reality.
Descriptions of my work depress me. They make me feel pinned down.
You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.
You can't make anything authentic by asking people what they want because they don't know what they want. That's what they're looking at you for.
I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.
The multiplicity of ideas is what Im interested in.
I'm interested in conflict and confrontation.
So we can't go backwards, we can only go where the evolutionary trajectory is taking us and attune our ideas about ourselves and our existence to that course.
We only exist in terms of how we think we exist. Meaning every cultural development is fabricated and can be fabricated.
The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.
Architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.
Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.
The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.
My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.