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Six years ago he was the rowdy prince of paper architecture. Now he's
got eight major projects in the works. Has success tamed this
confrontation artist?
By Adam Davidson
March 2003
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DIAMOND RANCH HIGH SCHOOL, 1999
In Morphosis's Pomona public school, some sharply angled classrooms are
cantilevered over playing fields and others have windows onto the
campus's main pathway.
Courtesy Morphosis
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For some people the worst possible caricature of American architecture came
to life at UCLA a few months ago, when a dozen leading architects spoke
at a student event called "The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful."
The stage had the usual two long tables forming a V, with a seat and microphone
for each speaker. Strangely the V bent away from the audience and the architects
sat with their backs to the crowd, talking to one another as if nobody else
was present. There was a lengthy discourse about the importance of deconstructing
the path of travel through an art exhibition. For a long time a photo of
several clean Dutch children dyeing Easter eggs was used to make a point
about the faces of morphing "manimals" and their essential relevance
to structure. Most of the work discussed was paper architecture that would
never be built; only other architects would ever see it--or understand it.
In other words, it was just one more day in the life of progressive architecture.
After an hour or so the oldest architect there, 58-year-old Thom Mayne,
was asked to speak. He did something surprising: he turned around, faced
the audience, and talked about his feelings and what he was hoping to accomplish
in clear language easily understood by the uninitiated. Mayne spoke about
built work--buildings he designed that had actually been constructed and
exist in the world. He described the Diamond Ranch High School, completed
in 1999, which he says moved him from being a paper architect to someone
whose ideas and designs interact with the world outside progressive architecture.
And, he said, the experience changed his life: "I was over 50 years
old and this was the first time I produced a piece of work that I could
believe in. This was the first project where the aesthetic act and
the social act were singular."
A few days later Mayne said he'd been upset that the rest of the conversation
was so abstract, so disconnected from the people who would actually use
the buildings these speakers hoped to design. But, he said, it's hard to
blame young architects for discussing projects that haven't been built since
in the United States few major commissions go to architects under the age
of 50. "I remember when I was forty-two, forty-three, forty-four, and
I was seething because I couldn't get serious work," Mayne said. But
because young architects are limited largely to paper architecture, they
aren't engaging the public. "It furthers this kind of marginalization,"
he said. "The discussions remain esoteric--they remain within the aesthetic,
formal, philosophical realm."
It's odd hearing Thom Mayne dismiss paper architecture. For much of his
career he was famous for being one of the best--and most esoteric--paper
architects in the country. He designed brilliant major works--an art center
for Emory University; a golf clubhouse in Chiba, Japan; studios for MTV--that
were never built, though other architects saw them in magazines like Progressive
Architecture. Mayne did build several small projects--mostly homes and restaurants--for
the architectural cognoscenti, but, he says, this time was immensely frustrating.
He would scream at clients and became famous for his explosive temper. "None
of my clients would recommend me," he says. "At the beginning
of your work, you're defining who you are artistically. It's intensely
confrontational and radical."
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SAN FRANCISCO FEDERAL BUILDING, 2005
The surface of this 18-story office building is made of glass and an undulating
perforated metal screen.
Courtesy Morphosis
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Mayne's early work was eclectic, and it's difficult to describe a signature
style, but there's a lot of metal, concrete, and glass in severe yet playful
shapes. The form is aggressive: large irregular blocks jut out into public
spaces. There is often some detail--a door or a large clock--that is so
elaborately overdesigned it looks like a twenty-first-century Rube
Goldberg device. Mayne won countless awards--including 19 Progressive Architecture
awards or citations in 25 years--and had a strong effect on other architects,
particularly in Southern California. "It's kind of ridiculous how many
projects were influenced by Thom," L.A. architect Greg Lynn says.
"There's a high degree of fragmentation--the use of screens of different
materials. I don't know what you'd call the way Thom still does aperture,
where he slices open exits in walls without framing them."
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SAN FRANCISCO FEDERAL BUILDING, 2005
Rendered just left of center in this skyline shot, Morphosis's building
will be located south of Market Street at Seventh and Mission in San Francisco's
Civic Center district.
Courtesy Morphosis
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Mayne may have been the darling of architecture's in-crowd, but he couldn't
get the large public projects that would allow him to engage a broader audience.
"I shouldn't have been doing cafés and restaurants at 45 years
old," he says. "I could have been president of the United States."
By then his architectural vision was well developed and powerful, and he
had calmed considerably. ("I was a raging maniac until five years
of shrink," he says.) Mayne was ready, but he couldn't get the work.
As recently as 1994 he had only six people in his office. He was lucky
to get restaurant commissions.
And then it all changed. Suddenly, the year he turned 55, he started getting
major work. "My practice went from jobs that were half a million dollars
to jobs that are 200 million dollars," Mayne says. "It was just
this weird, bizarre shift." It began in 1997 with a design competition
for Diamond Ranch High School. Only this time, rather than lose the competition
and win some design award, Mayne was actually offered the job. He says it's
still his favorite building and insists that I go out to see it with him.
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EUGENE FEDERAL COURTHOUSE, 2005
Three of the Oregon building's courtrooms (there are six in all) are visible
on the third floor in this section drawing--two to the left of the central
atrium and one on the right.
Courtesy Morphosis
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Mayne picks me up in downtown L.A., and we drive 40 minutes into the eastern
suburbs. We pass South Whittier, the working-class suburb where Mayne grew
up. His father abandoned the family early, so it was just him and his mom
and his little brother. Mayne's mother was a pianist who didn't make much
money, and she refused to drive a car. So, he says, they were trapped--a
cultured family in a neighborhood without culture. Mayne was an angry, difficult
kid. "I was a terror," he says. "In the hall or the principal's
office all the time."
Mayne turns his car off the 60 freeway, into Pomona, another eastern suburb
built into barren hills. I've seen Diamond Ranch in dozens of pictures,
and in movies like Orange County and The Cell, but my first glance
of the real building is shocking and exciting. It's an imagined city of
concrete buildings with broad lines of glass under gigantic undulating silver
roofs that mimick the surrounding hills.
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CALTRANS DISTRICT 7 HEADQUARTERS, 2004
This view from the plaza of the Los Angeles headquarters for the state transportation
authority looks up at a perforated metal shade screen.
Courtesy Morphosis
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A group of senior football players walks by. When I ask what they think
of the school, they smile and laugh. "It feels all futuristic, like
2010 or something," one says. "Nice school. Real nice."
"Most schools are just straight up and down," the second says.
"This is like, this is creative--all sorts of shapes and things."
"It just looks all...at first I thought it was a penitentiary,"
the third says.
Mayne can't contain himself: "Penitentiary?" He leans in toward
the kid, holding his head in exasperation. "I worked so hard. We tried
to get rid of all the fences. I think it's horrible when schools look like
penitentiaries. That's what the school I went to looked like. I hated it.
I want a school that makes you guys dream, man. We worked so hard to make
this thing look like it flies." He stretches his long arm and
shakes his hand like a bird flying. "I wanted you to think: if
I can do it, you can do it."
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CALTRANS DISTRICT 7 HEADQUARTERS, 2004
The street address looms over the entryway of the building. The ground floor
will include amenities such as restaurants.
Courtesy Morphosis
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Without a beat, the penitentiary critic says, "You put too many stairs.
Get here in the morning and after practice, climbing all over, man."
He laughs. "It's a workout, all those stairs."
At that UCLA conference, when Mayne said Diamond Ranch represented the meeting
place of the aesthetic and social, I thought that meant some specific
idea about better physical spaces for learning. Maybe he'd designed a classroom
that encourages cooperative education. But walking through the building,
Mayne tells me that's not it at all. In fact, the interior of the school
is pretty much identical to any other new school. There are regulations
that even he didn't fight. I ask him to point out a place where the
social and the aesthetic come together. "It's not a point," he
says. "It's the whole idea. Pulling up to the school, it's over. It's
either working or not working for you."
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SAN FRANCISCO FEDERAL BUILDING, 2005
The building features skip-stop elevators that serve every third floor,
forcing inhabitants to interact with those on other floors.
Courtesy Morphosis
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Mayne explains that the building was meant to be a critique of education:
"We live in a culture that's so unsophisticated, so bottom-line. They're
just getting people to read and do math. It's tragic. Let culture drive
education: learn poetry, learn art--and then you'll be driven to learn the
mechanics of doing mathematics and reading." The brief for this project
was much like the one for any new school: there wasn't much money, there
wasn't much time, and there was a conservative culture pushing for a conservative
building. It's a lot like the education going on in the classrooms. So this
building is a refutation of the premises of contemporary public-school education.
"Like it or hate it," he says. "Doesn't matter." Mayne
wants students to see that this building does not "accept the nature
of what a school is supposed to be today--the immense ordinariness. It's
trying to do something. It proves as illegitimate this reality that people
are constructing."
It's also a personal manifesto--an attack on "the resistance to my
dreams, my whole life," Mayne says. "I'm a fucking dreamer, and
I was always told I couldn't do it. But here it is. It's not perfect, but
it's as good as I could do, and it's here. And you could do it. Don't let
anybody tell you, 'You can't do it.' That's their problem." It is a
statement that can only be made in concrete and steel and glass. The power
of the school is that it exists and interacts every day with students and
teachers, and an entire educational system. "Architecture can't just
be on paper," Mayne says. "You have to build. That's what makes
us architects."
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