A maverick architect's mellower side

Can it be that Thom Mayne, the architect of confrontation, has gone soft? His acclaimed design for Paris's tallest office building, chosen on Dec. 1, is an elegant silhouette draped in a diaphanous skin, a far cry from the sharp corners, violent eruptions, and fragmented forms that led some to call him the architect of dislocation.

"I've shown a softer side; my wife is really teasing me," Mayne, 62, said in an interview at Morphosis, his firm in Santa Monica, California. "The sensuousness of Paris found its way into the project."

He likened the building, the Phare Tower, to a "layered dress" or a woman's slip. "The skin becomes primary, the body secondary," Mayne said. "It becomes metabolic, the skin. It moves."

The centerpiece of a rethinking of La Defense, a coldly received office district on Paris's western outskirts, his eco-friendly tower seems to rise organically from its base, sloping gently upward before peaking in delicate fragments that will serve as wind turbines.

Mayne triumphed over some of the hottest architects in the world in this competition: Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron; Rem Koolhaas; and Jean Nouvel. In this newspaper, Nicolai Ouroussoff commended the choice, calling the tower "a work of sparkling originality that wrestles thoughtfully with the urban conflicts of the city's postwar years."

Mayne said the building was still a work in progress; he spent only three months on his design entry before submitting it. While the surface is currently perforated stainless steel, for example, he said it might be something else entirely by the time he is finished. He said he had enlisted a fashion photographer to shoot the site over an extended period, photographing it at different times as he revolved around it, so Mayne can get a sense of how the light shifts throughout the day and seasons.

"I'm not sure what will happen," he said of the design. "I produce something, attack it, it moves, it changes, it responds to the nature of that critique. It happens reiteratively till we've exhausted the idea. Then it's complete, it's done. I'm not done. I just started."

While his forms may have changed then, his methodology apparently remains consistent: He breaks things down before figuring out how to put them together; he upends traditional expectations. For his hulking Caltrans District 7 headquarters in Los Angeles, housing the state agency that oversees the city's freeway system, Mayne rejected the downtown area's standard towers and plazas in favor of a vast urban lobby carved through its core. To eerie effect, he created a perforated metal facade whose mechanized panels open and close, transforming the structure's highly animated face as day gives way to night.

At the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, where he designed a new engineering school and art studios, Mayne defiantly played off the ponderous 19th-century Foundation Building across the street, creating a hivelike glass atrium in which students can be viewed crossing back and forth between labs and studios.

Last year, when he captured the Pritzker Prize, the profession's Nobel, he was saluted for carrying the rebellious spirit of the 1960s and a "fervent desire for change" into his practice, "the fruits of which are only now becoming visible in a group of large- scale projects."

Of course, there are always the commissions that got away, like the redesign of Rutgers University's flagship campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey (Enrique Norten won that this month) and the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, to be designed by Richard Rogers.

Perhaps most stingingly, Mayne was dumped (his term) last year from the ambitious Grand Avenue project, a retail-commercial development in central Los Angeles. (He was replaced by Frank Gehry.)

In response to such setbacks, Mayne is preparing to open a New York office so he can physically be more front and center for potential clients. (He said he also plans to split time between there and Los Angeles.) And despite his brash reputation, Mayne said he has long since realized that diplomacy is a requirement.

He said: "Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That's the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do. At the same time, do I listen? My clients would tell you I'm a farm boy from Tipton, Indiana."

"I enjoy working with people," he said. "I understand that as a necessity. And clearly, that's something that develops as you get older. And I've grown into that."

Still, that role has been something of an adjustment for an architect who founded Morphosis in 1972 in opposition to the typical forms of contemporary architecture, which in his view failed to address the dislocations in modern society. The same year, he helped found the Southern California Institute of Architecture, with the goal of fostering critical thinking about the profession.

"I have an image of myself - drawing, provoking, conceptualizing," he said. "I'm in some sort of space between the investigative world of academia and the world of architecture. All of a sudden now, I'm in a position of authority."

But Mayne worked with what some might consider one of the most conservative clients of all: the U.S. government. He designed three projects under the General Services Administration's program to promote "design excellence" in architecture, including a federal office building in San Francisco; a federal courthouse in Eugene, Oregon; and a satellite station for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, outside Washington.

Mayne said he had to parse even the smallest detail on these projects, though he had come to accept such detailed back-and-forth as routine. As the options have multiplied, so has his workload; Mayne continues to log long hours. "In architecture, you arrive so late," he reflected. "I look at doctors, lawyers I know, and they're all buying boats and bailing out at 62. My career is just getting started."

"Now that I'm making money, I don't want anything," he said. "The part that changes is, I'm building an institution. I'm institutionalizing my studio and building a sophistication."

Strange as it is to hear this former outsider talk about "institutionalizing," Mayne also insisted that he had not lost his maverick zeal. Part of his responsibility as an architect will always be telling it as he sees it, he maintained, not telling clients what they want to hear.

"I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture," he said. "It's a very passive, weak profession where people deliver a service. You want a blue door, you get a blue door. You want it to look neo-Spanish, you get neo-Spanish.

"Architecture with any authenticity represents resistance. Resistance is a good thing."

(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved