Thom Mayne, the Santa Monica architect known for hard-edged, aggressively unconventional designs, today will be named the winner of the 2005 Pritzker Prize, the field's most prestigious honor.
Mayne, whose most prominent completed projects include the new Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles and Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, is the first American architect to win the prize since Robert Venturi in 1991 and the first from Southern California since Frank O. Gehry in 1989.
"My first reaction was shock," Mayne, 61, said in an interview at the airy if surprisingly nondescript offices of Morphosis, the firm he co-founded in 1972. "When you run a cultural and artistic practice, as we do, instead of just a business, you never know where it's going to lead."
He's not likely to be the only one surprised by the news. 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.
"There is a real authenticity to the work that we liked," said Gehry, a member of this year's Pritzker jury. "There's no denying he has carved out his own path and hasn't strayed from it. He's not copying anybody else."
Another juror, Karen Stein, editorial director of publisher Phaidon Press in New York, praised Mayne for designs that had "consistently explored and expressed architecture as a risk-taking, visceral experience."
The Pritzker is often called the Nobel Prize of architecture because of its prestige and because it honors an architect's body of work rather than a particular project. When Chicago's Pritzker family, founders of the Hyatt hotel chain, established the prize in the 1970s, they did so in part because the Nobel Prize did not include an architecture category.
