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Thom Mayne |
UCLA Professor of Architecture Thom Mayne was awarded the
2005 Pritzker Prize – an award considered by many to be
architecture’s Nobel Prize. He is the first American to
receive the honor since 1991.
Mayne, who joined the UCLA faculty in 1993, is founder of the
Santa Monica-based architectural firm Morphosis, which he and
partner Michael Rotondi established in 1972. He has been active
in the academic world throughout his 30-year career. In addition
to being a tenured professor at UCLA, he is a founder of the
influential and progressive Southern California Institute of
Architecture, and he has been a visiting professor and lecturer
at institutions and universities around the world.
Colleagues say that Mayne is as passionate a teacher as he
is a practitioner.
“Thom is an inspiring teacher and very committed to his
students,” said Richard Weinstein, acting chair of the
Department of Architecture and Urban Design in the School of
the Arts and Architecture. “He’s so much in demand
by his students that they are willing to go anywhere at any time
to be able to work with him. He has a passionate commitment to
the profession of architecture that is infectious. He teaches
what he practices, and practices what he teaches.”
The Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor, is
among many that Mayne has won during his career. He has
received some 54 AIA Awards, 25 Progressive Architecture Awards,
as well as numerous other awards around the world. In fact, the
UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design received the
2005 Progressive Architecture Award for an urban design research
project that was led by Mayne. The 2005 award was unprecedented
because it was granted to just one recipient – UCLA – rather
than to several, and it was the first time the award was given
to a university.
Mayne’s work “exemplifies an astonishing level
of consistency and conviction,” said Houston architect
and Pritzker juror Carlos Jimenez. “The dynamics of this
focused pursuit do not result in predictable or rarefied architecture,
but produce an architecture that invites us to be full participants
and recipients of the architect’s abundant inventiveness.”
Among Mayne’s most recent works is the Caltrans District
7 headquarters and the Science Education Resource Center/Science
Center School, both completed in Los Angeles in 2004. Recently
he was awarded the commission for the design of the new Alaska
state capitol building to be built in Juneau, Alaska.
Mayne received the Pritzker Prize, which includes a bronze
medallion and a $100,000 grant, during a formal ceremony in May
in Chicago.
Story by David Greenwald; photo by Mark Hanauer, courtesy
of the Pritzker Prize web site. Published March 22, 2005; updated
December 20, 2005.
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