Thom Mayne: Architectural Bad Boy

Brigham Young University

Thom Mayne: Architectural Bad Boy

March 10, 2006

He is referred to as a "Bad Boy", a "Maverick", and a "Loose Cannon" in today's architectural world. His methods are unorthodox, highly progressive, and revolutionary. Thom Mayne and his California-based architectural firm Morphosis have infiltrated the building scene to wow critics and scholars alike with his cutting-edge designs and uncanny sense of aesthetic function. Thom Mayne was recently named in 2005 as the winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize award for his designs and innovation in architecture. Indeed, many do not see him as such a bad boy when they consider the things he has accomplished with his buildings. Looking at his projects, Mayne has clearly developed his reputation as a radical by making strong new efforts in economy, practicality, and aesthetic value in his designs and everything else that makes up the basics of practical building. Such characteristics were stunningly manifest in his recent project in Pomona, California in the construction of the new Diamond Ranch High School (Figures 1-2), one of the projects that helped him secure his status as a Pritzker Laureate and further established his place as an artist who defies standard practice as well as well as defines it.

Of course it would seem that for such a maverick in the architectural world, his reception of the Pritzker Prize would signal his official inauguration into the establishment, which would be inconsistent with the bad boy image he is known for. In reality, Mayne's guerilla-like tactics he carefully uses to instigate change are precisely what have carried him into his current realm of veneration by many who view his work. His work achieves its ground breaking reality by forcing concessions, little by little, of those who judge it and over time gathers these concessions in small increments to push or complete the fundamental change he was striving for. This fundamental change is well illustrated by the Diamond Ranch High School near Pomona, California whose completion in 1999 marked his grand entrance into the world of built architecture and has been compared by some to Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia Campus.

Discussing his influences, Mayne describes his fascination with earlier architectural radicals like Pompidou, or James Sterling, whose work Mayne describes as "clanky" and "machine-like" and undoubtedly influential in his own. He also expresses great interest in the work of Giorgio de Chirico, his greatest interest being that in his opinion de Chirico could not paint. In this, Mayne appreciates the power of the stillness, the primariness, and the childlike quality of it to himself as a large influence.

According to Mayne himself, it doesn't take a whole lot to be a bad boy in our current culture. His goal as he sees it is to attack complacency and in the case of the Diamond Ranch High School, to encourage precisely that attitude among its students.

"Teachers should be looking for vibrancy and creativity and nurturing curious minds." He says, "I could do no better if that happens."

Mayne set out with school administration officials to express through one heterogeneous design the schools goals of educational flexibility and social interaction between students, teachers, and administrators. They met their goal with success.

One of the most notable accomplishments of Diamond Ranch is that the striking and unorthodox forms of the project cost no more than a traditional looking school. Mayne was faced with the incredible task to design a school that would rest on a hillside in Pomona (Figure 3) that had been deemed impractical if not impossible to build on. Mayne's solution was to build the school into the landscape and achieve much of its primary form by terracing the surfaces below along the natural fall of the land (Figures 4-6) forming what has been described as a double landscape.

The difficulties with the landscape as well as the budget constraint were ultimately what gave Mayne his startling success in the building. Much of the reason Diamond Ranch was so meaningful and successful was because of the struggle with such a low budget for such a large project. The manner in which Mayne and his firm rose to meet the challenge is part of what makes his methods so revolutionary. In this case he concentrated stylistically on large moves, to create a unifying formal language to the building and find economy where most designers might have sought the opposite.

In the actual design of the building, Mayne employs unusual and unexpected shapes and forms and contemporary building materials. These forms and materials serve to creatively and unexpectedly meet the budget he was given and also to challenge the minds of its students and force them together with the faculty. The idea is that the two can mutually benefit from each other and the space they are in can help them accomplish that. This forcing of the school's population together and its overbearing temptation in form to distract the students from their normal tasks and stimulate their minds is precisely what Mayne was striving to achieve. What he commonly strives to attain with his work is to force a small concession in a course for fundamental change.

Diamond Ranch is only an example of the agenda Mayne is trying to accomplish with his radical techniques. As with the high school, Mayne frequently uses ordinary materials combined and engaged in unusual ways to create a unique experience that can be all at once complex, economical, harmonious and ambiguous. We see in the way he has integrated the High School into the topography of the land a characteristic contradiction, a rhythmic movement between fluidity and angularity. The design seems to come and then go, and makes no compromise as to how skin and structure determine the look of a building.

Similar advances are made in all of Mayne's work. The new Caltrans District 7 Replacement Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles for example (Figure 7), exhibits many of the achievements of the Diamond Ranch School in a larger scale. In this project, Mayne treated the skin as alternately solid and immaterial allowing him to visually sculpt the building while accentuating a strong edge on the adjacent plaza creating a similar effect to the High School and its economical integration into the surrounding geography. Mayne's maverick techniques rendered the Caltrans Project a success in terms of environmental achievement, civic presence, cost, architectural innovation, and aesthetic power, and