Building conflict and confrontation
March 21, 2005 10:48 AM   Subscribe

Thom Mayne, co-founder of morphosis and Sci-Arc, has won the Pritzker Prize.
posted by xowie (13 comments total)
 
This is the guy who is right now trying pretty hard to screw up my school. (Click "Inside Story" for the most powerfully concentrated bullshit you've read in your life, and don't miss the gallery of vomit-inducing interior views with badly photoshopped people.) Interestingly, this news seems to have triggered a major update there including the until now undisclosed floorplans, which I'll have to check out now.

I had a chance to indirectly ask him a question sometime next year - I asked the President of the school if the students would have any chance for input on this building, which at that point was already shaping up to be a disaster. The President passed the question onto Mayne who was sitting in front of him. Mayne mostly muttered his response, so I couldn't hear all of it, but it was along the lines of "I don't see how those kids have any right to input."

So we're going to have fancy staircases and elevators that skip stops, but a distinct lack of classroom and studio space. And windows that make your eyes hurt if you're too close to them, if what I've read about his CalTrans building is true. At least I think we're lucky enough to have a roof over the hallways, unlike a high school he did.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 11:46 AM on March 21, 2005


Ok, I've never heard of this person. Could someone briefly summarize him? I don't feel like dealing with overly-ornate Flash sites at the moment.
posted by InnocentBystander at 11:57 AM on March 21, 2005


I don't feel like dealing with overly-ornate Flash sites at the moment.

Weird. I'm not seeing any overly ornate Flash.


posted by eyeballkid at 12:16 PM on March 21, 2005


Briefly summarized: he's the kind of guy who would have that Flash site.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 12:19 PM on March 21, 2005


While not the most concentrated bullshit I've read in my life(that title most probably goes to the PNAC), i agree that this building is fairly hideous. Elevators that only stop on floors 4 & 7? That seems to invite ADA lawsuits, unless i missed something like "we feel that developing teleporter technology will replace traditional elevators in the near future, so we left some floors out."
posted by schyler523 at 12:59 PM on March 21, 2005


I would like to add that some of Mayne's other works are beautiful. I think that Tim's point is that Mayne tends to favor form over function, and in some instances that is not appropriate.
posted by schyler523 at 1:06 PM on March 21, 2005


It looks like they've actually compromised on the elevators - if I'm reading the floorplan right there are three elevators, two of which stop on every floor. The third stops on floors one, five, and eight.

If you don't like lifts, there are three staircases - two regular ones and an abortion in the middle that is killing nine classrooms' worth of space.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 1:08 PM on March 21, 2005


I've been an admirer of Morphosis ever since I started architecture school in the late 90's, and their (at that point mostly unbuilt) work became much-needed inspiration for me in what architecture could be, though not necessarily what it is. I didn't try to emulate their work, though periodically I had to hide those monographs from glowering, disapproving professors.
There is something about their architecture that doesn't make a whole lot of sense with what we're trained, and this is fascinating for me - a complete break with what is now "traditional" efficient modernist systemization. Thom certainly emphasizes form over function (a reversal which is itself a radical act in architecture), though he has a difficult time admitting this, especially to clients and students who ask confronting questions at lectures...
And as far as the concentrated bullshit goes, welcome to the world of architectural narratives.
posted by sharkitect at 1:24 PM on March 21, 2005


The last link has plenty of summary info, InnocentBystander.

Although Pritzker winners have included several members of the architectural avant-garde, Mayne has been considered one of the most polarizing figures in architecture. His verbal battles with clients and builders are legendary in the profession. And there is nothing traditionally beautiful or explicitly welcoming about his designs.

"I'm interested in conflict and confrontation," Mayne said. His buildings, often cloaked in canted or folded metal screens, giving them a dramatic silver-gray cast, have a muscular presence. They use fragmented forms to express the anomie of contemporary life — and of sprawling, centerless Los Angeles in particular...

Although Mayne tends to describe his architecture as progressive and optimistic, others see its forms as alienating, even nihilistic. To the walkways suspended above the playground of the Science Center School in Exposition Park, finished last year, Mayne added metal screens that from certain angles resemble blades, their chiseled edges pointing straight down over kindergartners' heads.

The Caltrans building is another case in point. After it opened last fall, detractors quickly dubbed it the "Death Star." Its facade — roughly 400 feet long by 200 feet high — is among the most monolithic in the city, with a skin of aluminum panels that open and close in response to the amount of sunlight on the building.


/spoonfeed

The panels that open and close with the sun remind me of Tom Wolfe's snidely funny attack on modernist architecture in "From Bauhaus to Our House." LA Times critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote a biting review of Maynes' latest work (with a summary of past modernist/non-modernist battles) in Slate last fall:

Certain elements of the design suggest an architect concerned most of all with sheer aesthetic wallop. For example, photovoltaic solar panels cover the southern facade, the side of the building on which the sun shines most consistently. But if Mayne and his colleagues wanted to use solar power to reduce operating costs, they might have considered turning more than a sliver of the building toward the sun. The panels will generate just 5 percent of building's energy needs.
posted by mediareport at 1:28 PM on March 21, 2005


His proposed new Federal Courthouse in Eugene has turned into a fair bit of controversy locally. It's supposed to be the first major federal building conceived and built post 9/11 which means that security is a paramount concern. And as a court house, it needs to be a very open, accessible structure that is going to serve the same function for many, many years to come.

Yet the design commission chose a company that is noted for putting form over function (as already mentioned).

The biggest furor locally (alas, the local paper only keeps archives online in a paid area) had to do with the complete lack of a wheelchair ramp. Accessibility advocates pointed out that it kind of puts a "second class citizen" stamp on a group of people trying to get into a place that is ostensibly all about justice and equality. None the less, Morphosis fought tooth and nail against putting a ramp in as they felt it hurt the aesthetic. This kind of sums them up to me.

The bright side of this though is that it has started a public debate in this town about architecture. We've got a pretty decent architecture school here and we are starting to see people weigh in in Op-Ed's and letters to the editor about the more aesthetic side of development, not just the purely economic. I hope that the new courthouse ends up being an addition to the community and I rather hope that it pushes the debate about public space deeper into the community. If that happens, then I will consider it a success.
posted by afflatus at 2:07 PM on March 21, 2005


Morphosis fought tooth and nail against putting a ramp in as they felt it hurt the aesthetic.

Good lord. I figured that couldn't possibly be true, but it is. A local newspaper actually invited Mayne and two others on a 45-minute wheelchair tour so they'd reconsider the decision. They declined to participate, but the folks with disabilities prevailed in a "hard-won victory." I'm simply stunned that an architect in 21st century America had to be convinced that a wheelchair ramp at the front of a courthouse should be an integral part of the building's design. And this guy just won the Nobel equivalent for architecture?

You know, this is a great post, but fuck the Pritzker Prize.
posted by mediareport at 2:29 PM on March 21, 2005


Completely off topic, but I want to know how you found those stories in the Register Guard, mediareport? Stories older than 7 days are only available to paying customers and even I, as a regular paper subscriber, don't have access because I don't pay a seperate fee for their archive. When I did a google news search for "wheelchair ramp eugene" I only got stories from the last week.

Is this some good Goggle-fu and direct linking to cirumvent archive restrictions? Some bit around the RG's policy I don't know about? Inquiring minds want to know....

ObStory: Today's Register Guard has a front page article about the Pitzger Prize. It's attributed to the NY Times with contributions from a local reporter. This is the paper that staged the wheel chair tour, so the article had a fascinating tone to it. It wanted to trumpet the development of an award winning building that essentially was seen as capping a brilliant career for an architect...yet the paper was still pissed off about the building and the stupidity of the designer in the first place. How to balance self righteousness and obligatory sycophancy. A tough business, no?
posted by afflatus at 11:36 PM on March 21, 2005


I want to know how you found those stories in the Register Guard, mediareport? [...] When I did a google news search for "wheelchair ramp eugene" I only got stories from the last week.

Persistence, I guess. I searched "thom mayne" wheelchair eugene and clicked "repeat the search with the omitted results included." Google's fucking weird sometimes.

I don't have a clue how or why most newspapers work their archives so stupidly, but I'll be damned if I'll give up after a single search.
posted by mediareport at 1:44 AM on March 23, 2005


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