Thom Mayne

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne will become a major player in the revitalization of downtown New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, city officials announced Tuesday. Mayne and his Santa Monica firm, Morphosis, are providing the plans for the renovation and expansion of the Katrina-damaged Hyatt Regency New Orleans, adjacent to the Louisiana Superdome, and for a 20-acre performing arts park to be anchored by a new National Jazz Center to be designed by Mayne.

A lot of money and political energy has been spent on the 32-acre Cornfield site, and much more will be spent ["Fielding Dreams" by Christopher Hawthorne, Oct. 16]. But is it money and energy well spent? How many Angelenos will actually benefit from developing a state park on the site? A better use would be to build facilities on the site to deal with the immense homeless problem. The leaders of Los Angeles can do the right thing and build facilities designed to transition the poor and homeless back into society.

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.

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, who was named the 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate in March, is often referred to as an outsider, a nonconformist. His ultramodern designs -- and, at times, his temperament -- have been described as bold and aggressive. But even rebels have their Zen-like moments. When asked if winning architecture's most prestigious award gave him pause to reflect on a career spanning three decades, Mayne said he and his work are very much "engaged in the present."

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.