Morphosis Realizes its Vision

By Michael Webb - 2 May 2012

Forty years ago, a scrappy outsider called Thom Mayne established Morphosis as a practice committed to experimentation, and helped found the Southern California Institute of Architecture as a radical alternative to traditional architectural education. He was 28, a child of that rebellious era, propelled by a fierce passion to rethink architecture and find new forms of expression. From the first, Mayne was uncompromising, preferring to pursue an idea to its limits on paper than forfeit its integrity to get it built. In that regard, nothing has changed. He has been awarded the Pritzker and a hundred other honors for work of growing scale and complexity. In the past decade he has won the trust of universities, school boards, big corporations, and government agencies. Age and success have made him less aggressive, but no less determined to hold his ground. “I’m willing to give up a project for the sake of pursuing it in a conceptual way,” he says. “On several recent projects I’ve parted ways [from a client] with no sense of loss.” At an age when other architects are peaking or considering retirement, Mayne is as energetic and restless as ever. An interviewer’s question about a specific building may provoke an extended riff on the potential of architecture or a book on theory in a dozen different disciplines. Like a grizzled sea captain scanning the horizon for land, he’s always moving forward. “I still haven’t got to the projects I want to do, embracing the urban scale,” he says. “I’ve been castigated for fetishizing elements and making buildings more complicated than they needed to be and I always thought that was unfair. In the natural world we don’t criticize organisms for being too complex. Why can’t some things be intensified? This country is terrified of freedom [and] needs to be shaken up.” Morphosis is constantly shaking things up, in the US and abroad, but its new studio is an oasis of serenity. Located in Culver City, a former blue collar district of LA...