Architect Alum Nets Prestigious Award

A graduate and former visiting critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), who has received international acclaim for his unique work, was named the 2005 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Award yesterday.

“It is the singular most prestigious award in architecture,” winner Thom Mayne said. “When I got the phone call, I was dead silent.”

According to the Pritzker Award press release, Mayne is the head of Morphosis, an architectural firm which designs large-scale projects such as the Student Recreation Center at the University of Cincinnati, a federal courthouse in Oregon, a new art and engineering building for Cooper Union in Manhattan, and the headquarters building for California’s Department of Transportation in Los Angeles.

Mayne has also been commissioned to design the athlete’s village for New York City’s 2012 Olympic bid.

Mayne, 61, said he thought of the award as not only a tribute to a single work, but also a validation of his “insistence of his voice as an architect.” He said his emotional investment in his projects has brought successes and difficulties across a career that spans 30 years.

Some have said that Mayne’s work is widely cited by his contemporaries and critics for its originality and its deviation from the status quo.

Karen Stein, Pritzker Juror and Editorial Director of the Phaidon Press, a publisher of books on the visual arts, describes Mayne as “the biggest risk-taker in architecture.”

Mayne said he never intended to be a revolutionary.

“My work just demands a certain type of questioning, and that kind of thinking makes me a radical, [and] is seen as experimental,” he said. “I’m not trying to turn things upside down, I’m just asking questions.”

Mayne, who holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California (USC) and a masters degree from the GSD, has been teaching since he was 26. After graduating from USC, he taught briefly at Pomona College, leaving with several of his colleagues and forty students to found the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

When he was tapped to become the director of the institute, he said it became obvious that he needed a graduate degree. This necessity led him to the GSD in 1978 for a one year masters program and some “retooling.” Mayne said he remembers it as a year spent reading and meeting people, and described it as an “extremely useful time that at 34 was like a vacation.”

Mayne’s said his “retooling” time gave rise to his belief that “people over-invest in economy and history, and they should just look at problems and as basic questions.”

Stein said that Mayne’s beginnings as an architect were “influenced by the sixties.”

“It had a sense of rebelliousness, a sense of trying to break the rules just to break the rules,” she said.

However, Mayne said he is not so sure about this label.

“I don’t get it. It seems completely obvious in my mind what we are trying to do,” he said. “It’s like asking James Joyce about Finnegan’s Wake as he’s looking out the window. It’s logical in his brain and it’s the same with me.”

GSD Assistant Professor in Architecture Joseph R. MacDonald said Mayne’s talent is not limited to a narrow definition.

“Thom Mayne doesn’t have a specialty, he brings his unique skills to every project he is invited to,” he said.

Mayne said he believes contemporary architecture is defined by a cleavage between aesthetically based interpretations—the way a building looks—and values based interpretations—what a project symbolizes and contributes. Mayne said he strives to couch his projects in the latter rubric.

“I’m a product of the sixties and the social and cultural times,” Mayne said. “When they put a moon lander on the moon, that was really something.”

More than anything else, Mayne said he flees from the definition of architecture as either radical or successful, instead trying to phrase his own questions and articulate our culture’s problems.

“We are just making buildings here,” Mayne said. “We’re not putting people on the moon. Anything is possible [when you are] asking questions.”