Thom Mayne

Hear from celebrated maverick architect Thom Mayne, winner of the 2005 Pritzker Prize and the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award, at the fourth annual Glimcher Lecture.

Cosponsored by Ohio State's Knowlton School of Architecture.

Please note: This lecture has been rescheduled from an originally announced date of February 13 and has been moved from the Film/Video Theater to Mershon Auditorium. Mayne is an acclaimed theorist, professor, designer, and innovator. In 1972 he cofounded the interdisciplinary Santa Monica firm Morphosis. The firm's name means "to be in formation," and its philosophy is to combine graphics, interior design, printing, furniture, architecture, and urban design in a collaborative approach to creation. Mayne also initiated the genesis of the influential and progressive Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). He is currently a tenured professor at UCLA.

Mayne believes the architect must know a little bit about everything: architecture, he says, "is a generalist discipline not a discipline for the specialist." Not surprisingly, the products of his practice range from designs for watches and chairs to large-scale multipurpose buildings, educational facilities, and civic buildings. His detailed signature touch involves an ability to create works that appear to grow right out of the landscape, in which architecture and engineering are fully integrated to surpass the traditional bounds of forms and materials.

Mayne has received some 54 AIA Awards and 25 Progressive Architecture awards, as well as numerous other awards around the world. Notable projects include Sun Tower (1997), a retail and office building in Seoul, Korea; Diamond Ranch High School (1999) for the Pomona Unified School District in California; a major installation, Silent Collisions (1999), at the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam; a moveable set for the Charleroi/Danses Plan K Dance Group in Brussels, Belgium (2003); the Caltrans District 7 Headquarters (2004) in Los Angeles; and the Federal Office Building (2006) in San Francisco. In New York City, Morphosis’s designs won highly coveted architecture competitions to create a nine-story art and engineering building for Cooper Union in Manhattan (to be completed in 2008) and an Olympic Village in Hunters Point, Queens (to be completed in 2012 even though the U.S. lost its Olympic bid). His most recent commission is for a new State Capitol building in Juneau, Alaska.