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
We're producing spaces that accommodate human activity. And what I'm interested in is not the styling of that, but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity. And that directly connects to ideas of city-making.
Art in progress. MAK has occupied a unique and valuable space as international host for discourse between the arts and architecture.
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.
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.
Architecture is a result of a process of asking questions and testing them and re-interrogating and changing in a repetitive way.