Going public

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. By comparison, Mayne’s early work -- mostly residential commissions, restaurants and unbuilt theoretical proposals -- evoked dark, nihilistic machines.

Since then Mayne is a darling of both government bureaucrats and the architectural establishment. Among his projects scheduled for completion this year are the wonderful, stealth-like Science Center School at Exposition Park, designed for the Los Angeles Unified School District, and the 1.1-million-square-foot Caltrans District 7 headquarters building across from City Hall in downtown L.A. Also under construction are an 18-story tower for the federal General Services Administration in San Francisco and a courthouse in Eugene, Ore., where his principal client is a federal judge. In May, Mayne won a design competition for a housing development in Queens, N.Y., part of New York City’s 2012 Olympic bid.

These projects are imbued with a sense of optimism that his earlier work lacked. His once-militaristic forms have given over to a more potent expression of communal values.

Some in the architectural community will regard this transition with suspicion. They may see it as a sign that the work is too easily digestible, that it is losing its edge. And so far, Mayne has failed to land the kind of high-profile cultural commissions that can propel an architect into the upper echelons of the profession.

But Mayne’s contribution to architecture may be equally important. His large-scale public projects serve as a valuable bridge between architecture’s once-marginalized creative class and those who are often most distrustful of creative thought: government officials and developers.

That Mayne has accomplished this feat without substantially compromising his core values is a small miracle. It also reflects one of the most promising shifts in American architecture in a generation: the continuing erosion of the once-firm boundary between the business of mainstream architecture and the so-called radical fringe.

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In search of a signature style

Mayne’s early life is a somewhat typical American story. Born in 1944 to a conventional Midwestern family, he attended Methodist church on Sundays and spent summers on his grandfather’s Indiana farm. His father, a midlevel business executive, abandoned the family when Mayne was 5, and the family eventually resettled in a working-class section of Whittier. His mother took a job as a salesclerk at the former May Co. department store as the family struggled to keep from tumbling into poverty.

Architecture, according to Mayne, offered a kind of emotional sanctuary. “The suburbs of California was kind of a primitive place culturally. My whole life I’d been inundated with stories from my Mom. She was talking about Modigliani in Paris and I was living in Whittier -- there was this huge disconnect. “I was a lost soul,” he recalls, “so getting into architecture was a very slow process for me.”

In 1963, Mayne enrolled at USC’s School of Architecture, then a haunting ground for the fading heroes of Southern California Modernism, including such Case Study architects as Pierre Koenig, Gregory Ain and Rafael Soriano.

“When I got to USC, it became astonishing to me that I could be a man and an artist -- that that was OK,” Mayne says.

But Mayne and his contemporaries had no interest in that past. The image of postwar prosperity those architects helped to foster -- and that had become a defining feature of the Los Angeles ethos -- was about to crumble. By the end of the decade, many came to believe that the purity of postwar Modernism was simply a convenient way to mask a fraying social fabric.

“L.A. was still living this Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle,” says Craig Hodgetts, an architect who knew Mayne at the time. “We thought of these Modernists as the end of something, as part of a past we wanted nothing to do with. We felt closer to the emerging counterculture -- hippies, free sex and all that stuff.”

Mayne soon became a fixture among a loose-knit group of architects living in and around Venice Beach, including Hodgetts, Eric Owen Moss, Robert Mangurian, Fred Fisher, Coy Howard and Michael Rotondi. In 1972, Mayne joined Ray Kappe and others to found the Southern California Institute of Architecture, whose craft-based approach to design was meant to offer an alternative to the more rigid intellectual discourses of established East Coast schools.

At that time, the profession’s most dominant voices included architects such as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who extolled the virtues of roadside architecture, and European firms such as Archigram and Superstudio. Archigram, several of whose members were then teaching at UCLA’s school of architecture, was particularly influential, perhaps because its visions of inflatable, nomadic cities seemed to provide a direct link between L.A.’s pop landscape and a broader international avant-garde.

Mayne’s earliest work reflected this spirit of eclecticism. The 2-4-6-8 House in Venice, completed in 1978, was influenced by such architects as Venturi and the Italian Aldo Rossi, both of whom sought to use vernacular references to rekindle a sense of historical memory that the Modernists had apparently lost.

The house’s simple form and pitched roof, raised above a two-car garage, is a play on the conventional California bungalow. The cheap asphalt shingles and concrete-block base evoke visions of middle-class suburbia. Four oversized picture windows seem about to break out of their yellow frames, suggesting a deeper form of cultural analysis.

Other projects, such as the 1984 Lawrence Residence, relied on a strong axial geometry that verged on the Neoclassical. Its semicircular two-story atrium entry hall could have been inspired by Palladian villas.

Many of the projects from this era reveal an architect still struggling to find his aesthetic moorings. None achieved the haunting, atavistic power of Rossi’s best work, which could convey a sense of absence as powerful as any De Chirico painting. Nor could Mayne’s earliest designs measure up to Frank Gehry’s breakthrough 1979 Santa Monica House, whose fragmented form remains a landmark of 20th century design.

Nonetheless, their rawness -- especially as expressed in his elaborate, often brooding drawings -- began to garner Mayne increasing attention. “Drawings and models became a very important vehicle for conveying architectural ideas,” Howard says, “both as a way of participating in a broader discourse and to market the work.”

By the end of the 1980s, Mayne was becoming established as a central figure in the city’s architectural scene at a moment when Los Angeles was beginning to emerge from a prolonged cultural adolescence. He and his design partner, Rotondi, completed a series of small but high-profile restaurants and residences that were regularly featured in design journals and shelter magazines.

Such projects, which included the 1986 design for Kate Mantilini restaurant in Beverly Hills and Angeli Trattoria on Melrose, could often be packed with fussy ornamental details. The design for Kate Mantilini, for example, featured a sculptural “orrery” whose intricate, sharp-edged steel forms evoked a Kafkaesque torture instrument.

Yet they also became emblems of the city’s growing cultural sophistication. Mayne, meanwhile, was beginning to home in on the themes that would define his later work, among them a fascination with technology and the machine.

At its best, the work seemed to tap into the anger of youth culture. And it also acted as a powerful critique of the kind of naive postwar optimism that had defined late Modernism. To Mayne, technology’s effect was more ambiguous. The machine, as he once put it, could be both “creator and destroyer.”

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The architect reinvented

Mayne’s creative breakthrough did not come until later, when he won a competition to design the Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona in 1993. One of the architect’s first major public commissions, Diamond Ranch allowed him to explore broader social issues with an intensity that had so far been impossible.

“Until then, my heroes were people like James Sterling,” he says of the late British architect. “You know, you went to his office and there was no place for a client to sit. I loved that kind of fierce independence. And I kind of had that character. But I was also getting really angry and bitter because I wasn’t getting the work I wanted.”

Mayne, in fact, had a reputation for a short temper. Tall and imposing in stature, he was known for embarking on endless diatribes about the state of the profession. Most who remember him from that time say it was hard to get a word in edgewise.

“I had a clear choice in front of me. I was in my mid-40s. It became clear that everything did not have to be so black and white. The reality is that architecture is about negotiating two worlds -- maintaining the creative and still dealing with the political side, clients, budgets and all that. And that wasn’t such a bad thing.”

Whatever the motivation, Diamond Ranch was a break from the brooding aggression of his earlier works. It is Mayne’s most articulate work.

The school is organized along a jagged pedestrian court, with classrooms, gym and administrative offices plugged in on each side. Clad in corrugated metal, these forms evoke enormous ice formations that are breaking apart. Odd-shaped windows are carved out of the building’s corners. Paths slice through the forms to connect to various playing fields.

The effect is dreamlike. Mayne is celebrating the casual contact that is a vital aspect of urban life. Social friction becomes a metaphor for the free exchange of ideas.

But what is most unexpected about his design is its expression of unabashed social optimism. There is nothing nihilistic here. Instead, the hierarchy of communal spaces has more in common with the idealism of early Modernism than with the formal posturing of the 1990s.

That spirit has carried over into the more recent design for the Science Center School, set to open in September. Like Diamond Ranch, the 155,000-square-foot elementary school is anchored by a long exterior courtyard. Pedestrian walkways and bridges are suspended above the court, linking it to the nearby armory building and serving as an outdoor cafeteria.

Rather than create a visual icon, Mayne partly buried the school underneath a landscaped berm, so it blends with the Exposition Park’s Rose Garden. Along Figueroa, the structure’s horizontal form cantilevers out toward the street, as if it were struggling to break free from its surroundings. The effect is a subtle intertwining of man-made and natural landscapes. The fussy detailing is gone; there are no wasted gestures.

“It was a reaction to the armory, which is a historical building,” he says of his design. “Frank [Gehry] had built the Aerospace Museum on the other side, which is very bold. So I wanted to do something extremely quiet. I was reaching a place where I could explore different parts of my personality. I didn’t have to be so tough and relentless.”

Such subtleties, however, cannot completely explain Mayne’s ability to land so many major government commissions. He has developed strategies to push the level of design in public works projects beyond accepted norms. In a competition for the design of downtown’s new Caltrans District 7 headquarters building, set to open in September, he proposed a list of “design options” as if he were selling a car.

Mayne persuaded state officials to accept most of these options, including an expansive lobby and a system of exterior screens that could be adjusted to control light. Even so, the Caltrans building is being completed at roughly $165 a square foot -- a meager budget by any standard, even in an age when few government agencies feel they can afford to invest in good design.

The result is likely to be one of the few important works of architecture produced by a state agency in decades. Covering a block, the structure’s hulking form is draped behind a stunning perforated metal screen. The screen -- a favorite Morphosis device -- is a refined machine, hydraulic panels that open and close to control light and air.

The panels move with the delicacy of an eyelid. Key to the design is the hierarchy of public spaces: A partly covered plaza overlooks City Hall; a four-story exterior lobby is carved through the building’s core, allowing street life to flow inside; smaller lobbies are stacked within the interior.

Other recent projects are more atavistic. Despite its sinuous bands of forms, Mayne’s proposal for the 4,500-unit housing development in Queens, N.Y., evokes the early urban planning visions of Le Corbusier: a series of towers set in a vast park that suggests an idealized balance of man and nature.

Similarly, the muscularity of his courthouse design in Eugene, Ore., scheduled for completion in 2006, cloaks a sensitivity to American political traditions.

“Some of Thom’s politics would blast away at institutions I hold pretty dear,” says U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan, who acted as Mayne’s client for the project. “But he has actually shown himself to be a staunch defender of constitutional values. I think his design recognizes the historic meaning of the American court system.”

In some ways, such an attitude may represent a softening of Mayne’s aesthetic. His central obsession may still be the machine, but the machine has now become more benign. Despite the enormous scale of many of his new projects, they reveal a sense of acceptance that the earlier work lacked. And it is this, perhaps as much as any change in character, that has allowed Mayne to lay claim to a position that was once occupied by great midcentury corporate firms, such as New York’s Skidmore, Owings & Merrill or Los Angeles’ Albert C. Martin and Associates. During a brief period in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these firms were able to produce a number of exquisite architectural landmarks -- such as Martin’s elegant Department of Water and Power -- by creating a vision of modernity that was both progressive and unthreatening.

Mayne’s current work follows a similar path. But even in designing expressions of institutional power, he has been able to retain his underlying social agenda. His best work has a depth and complexity far beyond what we have come to expect in our public architecture. In an age of diminished expectations, this optimism may be its most radical feature.

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The architect’s vision evolves

2-4-6-8 House

Completed in Venice, Calif., in 1978, the small second-floor studio space was built as an addition to a 1920s beach bungalow. With its bold yellow picture windows, pitched roof and asphalt shingle cladding, its design was deeply influenced by the works of early Postmodern architects such as Robert Venturi and Aldo Rossi.

Kate Mantilini

Opened in 1986, the Beverly Hills restaurant was designed as a large open hall embedded in a former bank building. The most unusual feature is a large steel sculpture conceived as a three-dimensional representation of the design. The sculpture is set beneath a large oculus that allows light to spill into the space during the day.

Was Residence

Designed in 1988, the unbuilt concept was proposed for a steeply sloping site at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains. A bridge cuts across the center of the house to create a sense of compression. Small openings are carved out of its facade, revealing machine-like sculptural forms and giving the house the forbidding look of a military fortress.

Crawford Residence

The 1990 residence and guest house stand on a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Montecito. The house -- a composition of interlocking steel, concrete and redwood forms -- is hidden behind the fragment of a circular wall. Its interior is organized along a rigid formal axis with rooms plugged in on both sides.

International Elementary School

The school, completed in 1999, stands on a dense urban site in Long Beach. Classrooms are organized around a large central court. From there, a series of grand stairs lead up to a rooftop playground. The playground is wrapped inside a towering perforated metal screen, giving the design an added urban edge.

2012 Olympic Village

Mayne’s proposal for a 4,500-unit housing development on the edge of the East River in Queens, N.Y., is reminiscent of the vast urban schemes proposed by early Modernists, such as Le Corbusier. The design includes manufactured beach and sports facilities. The project was conceived as part of New York City’s bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

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