"We absolutely tried to convert each other," Mayne said.
Eventually the pair found common ground. When the 270,000-square-foot courthouse opens next year, it will not draw from the usual menu of classical details as the judge had hoped; Mayne never would have agreed to anything so reliant on architectural precedent. But in a streamlined, abstract way, it will convey the gravity and authority Hogan insisted on.
"It turned out that Judge Hogan was one of the few people that I could be my usual aggressive, blunt self with, and he realized it was all a form of play, of give-and-take," Mayne said.
If the collaboration taught him anything, he added, it was that "maybe I've mellowed a bit and gotten better at building relationships."
Gehry agreed. "He's really proven that he knows how to deal with these bureaucracies and government clients," he said. "That's allowed him to go into a kind of work that I've always stayed away from. If there's anything I envy him for, it's that."
Richard Weinstein, acting chairman of UCLA's architecture and urban design department, where Mayne has been a professor since 1993, suggested that whatever one thinks of Mayne's work, he deserves great credit for proving he can produce ambitious architecture for demanding or cost-conscious clients.
"He may be gruff," Weinstein said, "but he delivers."
Mayne is a child of divorce and of Southern California, two facts he has said mark his architecture. His parents divorced when he was 8 -- an event he talks about freely, saying he has tried to come to terms with it through years of psychoanalysis -- and he spent his teenage years in Whittier with his mother. Postwar Los Angeles boomed all around, but Mayne felt isolated, a self-described loner in his suburban high school.
He found some solace in the arts and earned an architecture degree from USC in 1968. That year -- with its echoes of the counterculture, political engagement and distrust for authority -- might as well be stamped on every one of Mayne's blueprints.
"There's no question that I left USC feeling inspired by all of that and connected to it, whether it was the Kennedys or Eldridge Cleaver," he said, the latter referring to a Black Panthers founder.
He worked as a planner in Victor Gruen's office for two years before helping form the Southern California Institute of Architecture, or SCI-Arc, with Ray Kappe and a small group of other architects in 1972.
