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
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.
I'm not a tabula rasa type. In some ways, the more constraints I have, the work is more interesting to me.
The age of recalcitrance is over. The best solution is no longer just to regurgitate a 19th-century design.
I'm not just influenced by the '60s - it's who I am. I grew up with Allen Ginsberg and Che Guevara. I flirted with various forms of communism when it was way out of style. It was this really strange and creative time in music and culture, and it was fabulous.
In architecture, you arrive so late. I look at doctors, lawyers I know, and they're all buying boats and bailing out at 62. My career is just getting started.
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.
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.
Although the private cannot be substantiated by common logic, you have to find a workable logic in which to argue on behalf of the work.
In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.
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.
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.
Architecture is a result of a process of asking questions and testing them and re-interrogating and changing in a repetitive way.