Thom Mayne Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Thom Mayne (born 1944) is an American architect, the founder of Morphosis and a co-founder of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). His buildings, assembled from layered steel skins, ramps and fractured volumes, challenge the conventional public building, from the Caltrans District 7 headquarters in Los Angeles to the San Francisco Federal Building and 41 Cooper Square in New York. He received the Pritzker Prize in 2005.

Connecticut, Los Angeles and SCI-Arc

Mayne was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1944 and moved to Southern California as a teenager. He studied architecture at the University of Southern California, graduating in 1968, and later at Harvard (1978). In 1972 he founded Morphosis and was one of the founders of SCI-Arc, an independent school that became a centre of experimental architecture in Los Angeles.

Morphosis

In its early years Morphosis, where Michael Rotondi was a partner from 1975 to 1991, built restaurants, houses and small buildings in Los Angeles. Larger commissions followed: the Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona (1999), the Caltrans District 7 headquarters in Los Angeles (2004), the San Francisco Federal Building (2007), 41 Cooper Square for the Cooper Union (2009), the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas (2012) and the Emerson College campus in Los Angeles (2014).

Recognition

Mayne received the Pritzker Prize in 2005 and the AIA Gold Medal in 2013, and has taught at UCLA for many years.