Thom Mayne

DALLAS - It's remarkable how slow - and disjointed - architecture can sometimes appear. For nearly a decade, younger architects have pushed for a new agenda in the profession. They've been loudly (and rightly) critical of the expensive, highly mannered and sometimes self-indulgent trophy buildings turned out by some of the world's most prominent architects. And they've helped bring different and more public-minded priorities to the fore. And yet the trophy buildings keep coming.

DALLAS - It's remarkable how slow - and disjointed - architecture can sometimes appear. For nearly a decade, younger architects have pushed for a new agenda in the profession. They've been loudly (and rightly) critical of the expensive, highly mannered and sometimes self-indulgent trophy buildings turned out by some of the world's most prominent architects. And they've helped bring different and more public-minded priorities to the fore. And yet the trophy buildings keep coming.

Architect Thom Mayne has been chosen to design a new Cornell University building that is to rise on Roosevelt Island in New York. Mayne, head of the Los Angeles architecture firm Morphosis, won a competition to design the first building for the CornellNYC Tech campus. The proposed building is to be approximately 150,000 square feet in size and will feature classrooms, lab space and offices for Cornell's high-tech graduate school campus. The $150-million building is scheduled to be completed by the start of the 2017 academic year.

Architect Thom Mayne has been chosen to design a new Cornell University building that is to rise on Roosevelt Island in New York. Mayne, head of the Los Angeles architecture firm Morphosis, won a competition to design the first building for the CornellNYC Tech campus. The proposed building is to be approximately 150,000 square feet in size and will feature classrooms, lab space and offices for Cornell's high-tech graduate school campus. The $150-million building is scheduled to be completed by the start of the 2017 academic year.

Creative wizards tend not to seem altogether human in public, but Thom Mayne jokes easily about his fascination with complexity and hard-to-grasp ideas. Lecturing to a large crowd at the Laguna Art Museum on Thursday night, the tall, bearded Santa Monica architect gestured toward his wife in the audience. "My chief critic tries to get me to cut out the intellectual bull," he said amiably.

As he entered the Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C., Thom Mayne sharpened his attack plan in his mind. The bad boy of American architecture was about to meet his new nemesis for the first time, and he wanted to set the tone early. His opponent that day in 2001 was U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan, a conservative jurist who stood for everything Mayne scorned.

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.

Thom Mayne, once the angry young man of Los Angeles architecture, is all grown up. Not so long ago, Mayne was a fixture of architecture's counterculture. His Santa Monica-based firm, Morphosis, came to prominence in the 1980s with an edgy aesthetic vision that was refreshing at a time when the profession was still caught up in the malaise of Postmodernism and its simplistic Neoclassical references.

Hammer Museum event: A listing in the "Happening Today" column in Tuesday's Calendar section said an event with artists Doug Aitken and Catherine Opie was Tuesday at the Hammer Museum. Tuesday's event was actually with Jeffrey Kipnis and Thom Mayne. The event with Aitken and Opie is tonight.

The design talent of Thom Mayne has finally blossomed after all these years of hard work and being an angry architect ("Going Public," July 25). I am glad that The Times wrote an article on someone, besides Frank Gehry, who is regarded as one of the finest designers among the international architectural community. Thank you for a fresh change. Amuro Ray Pasadena

Frank Gehry was on the panel. So was Thom Mayne. And fellow architects Eric Owen Moss, Peter Cook, Hernan Diaz Alonso and Greg Lynn. The subject was the "troubled relationship" between architecture and beauty. The setting, on a warm recent evening, was an outdoor pavilion in the main parking lot at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where Moss is director. The impresario, moderator and ego-wrangler was architect Yael Reisner, Cook's wife and the author of a new book of interviews with architects on beauty.

For an architect, designing a tourist attraction can be a thankless task. Almost by definition, your target audience is jet-lagged, searching for a place to have a cigarette, thinking about where to go for dinner, nursing a sunburn or a hangover (or both) or chasing a wayward toddler -- destined, in other words, to pay attention to everything but the architecture. Michael Rotondi and John Ash, lead architects of the new Hollywood branch of Madame Tussauds wax museum, which opened Aug. 1, understand the challenge of playing to that distracted crowd as well as anyone.

Hammer Museum event: A listing in the "Happening Today" column in Tuesday's Calendar section said an event with artists Doug Aitken and Catherine Opie was Tuesday at the Hammer Museum. Tuesday's event was actually with Jeffrey Kipnis and Thom Mayne. The event with Aitken and Opie is tonight.

The Orange County Museum of Art will relocate from Newport Beach to Costa Mesa, with Thom Mayne, winner of the 2005 Pritzker Prize for architecture, named Friday to design the building that will fulfill a long-standing vision of an all-purpose arts district combining the Orange County Performing Artscenter, South Coast Repertory and now the museum.

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne and his Santa Monica firm Morphosis are on the short list of candidates to design a 120,000-square-foot center for education and art for the Barnes Foundation, the organization announced Friday. The other five candidates are Tadao Ando of Japan; Diller Scofido + Renfro, New York; Kengo Kuma, Japan; Rafael Moneo, Spain; and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, New York.

As he entered the Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C., Thom Mayne sharpened his attack plan in his mind. The bad boy of American architecture was about to meet his new nemesis for the first time, and he wanted to set the tone early. His opponent that day in 2001 was U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan, a conservative jurist who stood for everything Mayne scorned.

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York announced Wednesday that Los Angeles-based architect Thom Mayne had been chosen to design a new 200,000-square-foot academic building for the college. Mayne's firm, Morphosis, was selected after a review of more than 200 firms and interviews with four. Morphosis will collaborate with Gruzen Samton to design the nine-story building.

Thanks for the article on Thom Mayne's architecture ("Going Public," July 25); now I know whom to blame. Nicolai Ouroussoff fawns over the "hulking" new Caltrans building, a looming, sullen structure I call the Death Star, and praises the new Science Center School, which looks unfinished (and always will). Its saving grace is that it is "partly buried ... so it blends with the Exposition Park's Rose Garden." (Couldn't they afford to bury more of it?) Mayne's latest works don't speak of the pleasure of shared public spaces, or the aspirations and ideals of our culture.

There haven't been many arranged marriages in architectural history more intriguing than the one set up seven years ago between Thom Mayne, who runs the Santa Monica firm Morphosis, and Michael Hogan, who has been a federal judge in this college town since the 1970s. Though similarly headstrong, the two men are polar opposites philosophically. Mayne is an unapologetic leftist, Hogan a religious and political conservative.