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
Architecture is a result of a process of asking questions and testing them and re-interrogating and changing in a repetitive way.
I've always been interested in an architecture of resistance - architecture that has some power over the way we live. Working under adversarial conditions could be seen as a plus because you're offering alternatives. Still, there are situations that make you ask the questions: 'Do I want to be a part of this?'
I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don't have to understand it. You may not like it. That's OK.
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.
Who I am as an architect and the history of my work - that's clear to anybody who hires me. But I come in literally with nothing in my brain about what the building will look like.
I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture. It's a very passive, weak profession where people deliver a service. You want a blue door, you get a blue door. You want it to look neo-Spanish, you get neo-Spanish. Architecture with any authenticity represents resistance. Resistance is a good thing.
I don't know any architects that I respect who don't have their own voice. I think the difference between architecture and the other arts is your immersion in reality.
I'm a private person by nature. I live in my brain half the time, not the world, and I'm not a natural negotiator. But I've learned to negotiate.
But often it's doubtful whether the logic of the work itself and the words used to describe it really have anything to do with each other.
New York is this cacophony - a collection of radical differences, an agreement of non sequiturs. The diversity and intensity are startling.
No matter what I've done, what I've tried to do, everybody says it can't be done. And it's continuous across the complete spectrum of the various kind of realities that you confront with your ideas.
The age of recalcitrance is over. The best solution is no longer just to regurgitate a 19th-century design.
I have a preference for rough architecture, real, inexpensive, unfinished.
Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That's the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do.