Morphosis Architects
Architect Thom Mayne is a principal of Morphosis, an architectural firm in Santa Monica, California and the 2005 winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA and was a member of President Obama's Committee on Arts and the Humanities.
Morphosis avoids designing an icon for OCMA Orange County Museum of Art closed its doors this weekend in Newport Beach. It will now move to a temporary location in South Coast Plaza Village in Santa Ana. Next year it will break ground on a permanent home at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa. The 52,000-square-foot building will sit on a space between the wavy glass Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, designed by architect Cesar Pelli, and the Segerstrom Hall that was designed by Charles Lawrence. This design by Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis is the third iteration after working with the museum for ten years. It builds on several decades of embattled efforts by OCMA to expand. Mayne and his team have designed buildings all over the world, among them, in LA: Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in downtown LA, Emerson College on Sunset and Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona. The designs demand attention. They tend to be severe and industrial but oddly beautiful, often made of thrusting concrete or steel with decorative metal skins and a sense of barely-contained energy. The goal in OC though, says Thom Mayne, was not to do another architectural icon. “True or not, we're seen as somewhat aggressive, kind of strong architects,” says Mayne, adding “we came out very early saying we don't want to do another object in a series of objects.” But this is his first art museum. He’s had around five near-misses -- and that includes being shortlisted for the LACMA expansion that was proposed back in 2001. He’s been eager to build one for a long time. “The museum is a challenge at this time in history in terms of the definition of an architectural response to it, to a museum of art,” Mayne said. But it is the architectural responses that sometimes worry art lovers, like Carolina Miranda, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times. “I was a little concerned when I heard that Mayne was the architect because Mayne is a big brash form maker and... designing a museum, sometimes the architect has to check the ego in at the door,” she said. As it turns out, Miranda -- who knows Orange County well, having attended high school in Irvine -- “was impressed with his design, in the sense that it's quite a simple design. It's not going to be a huge museum. The galleries have you know these basic rectilinear proportions and they're very flexible,” she said. “And he's designed this incredible staircase that goes on the outside of it. And all of it is centered around a Richard Serra sculpture that is currently already at the site, and is really trying to create this public space that doesn't really exist in that area currently.” Miranda is referring to Richard Serra’s epic sixty-six-foot high sculpture, called “Connector.” It’s made of five rusting steel plates that curve and torque towards the sky. “We literally tipped our hat at the Serra piece. It became you can say the generator for the whole urban idea,” explains Mayne. He describes the building as a kind of landmass, inspired by land artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, that is “stratified horizontally. It's a series of horizontal layers which are very kind of geological like the Earth layers but that horizontality is also meant to exaggerate the vertical nature of the Connector because, the way the building bends in and with the stair, we literally give you the space of contemplation with this thing in front of you.” The result is a kind of futuristic version of a Mediterranean public square and campanile -- in which the Serra artwork is the bell tower. This got us thinking about how every contemporary art museum these days has to have one of Serra’s powerful coiled, rusting corten steel sculptures. But they are not always integrated so directly into the architecture. “I do think his work is interesting especially on the material level and the engineering level,” Miranda said, “but he's just become one of those artists for collectors. And so a lot of museums and public spaces end up with them because collectors acquire acquire them and donate them.” “And because the museum design has been so long in coming that Serra has always felt kind of abandoned there. And so I'm glad to see Mayne giving it that attention because it shows an engagement not just with the buildings and the urbanism of that area, but with the art.” Some reporters have queried how the museum will pay for its new building. After all, says Miranda, OCMA still needs to build up its endowment. The board says they’ve raised a portion of the costs through selling their property in Fashion Island and now they are entering the “silent phase” of their capital campaign to raise the rest. So, does the new building warrant the expenditure? “It could be really great. It could not work. And so I think he's trying to inject a little bit of that in it, of this place that could be a little bit spontaneous. And I think Orange County desperately needs that,” Miranda said. A rendering showing the entrance to the new Orange County Museum of Art, with Richard Serra’s “Connector” sculpture seen to the left.
Thom Mayne's new Cheviot Hills house The Mayne house incorporates a design feature to honor the site's former resident, Ray Bradbury. It's a decorative metal panel in front of the house with cutout quotes from the author. Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury lived in the same house in Cheviot Hills for 50 years. A couple years ago, one of LA's most prominent architects, Thom Mayne and wife Blythe Alison Mayne, bulldozed it to build a new home. The couple promised a “very, very modest” house that would honor Bradbury in its design. Now that home is almost complete. Did they deliver? DnA got a preview of a residence that is a valentine to the “private rituals” of family life, a web of architectural tricks and influences, and a model for a resource-efficient anti-McMansion.
Taking care of LA County's housing needs with 1 percent of its land LA County alone has a population bigger than 42 states, yet housing hasn’t kept pace. Angelenos hardly agree on how to grow or whether to grow at all. The fight between sprawl and density is at the heart of ballot measures coming up in LA and Santa Monica. Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne has come up with a compromise of sorts. He says his plan will make room for 1.5 million more people, using just one percent of the county’s land.
A Taste of the Future at 'A New Sculpturalism' A New Sculpturalism will show models, sketches and photographs of buildings constructed by more than 30 of LA’s leading and lesser-known architects. But, knowing that architecture is best experienced at human scale, MOCA also commissioned walk-in pavilions designed by young architects -- Elena Manferdini, Georgina Hujlich and Marcelo Spina of the firm Patterns, and Tom Wiscombe. In addition they asked Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues of Ball-Nogues to create a custom gateway (as we air, their participation is still being negotiated.) DnA visited each of the designers in their studios to get a sense of what they are building, and got a taste of the digital design and materials research that might inform buildings of the future.
Drama in the Making of 'A New Sculpturalism' A couple years back, MOCA brought in a visiting curator, Christopher Mount, to create a show of LA architecture dating back 25 years. The Getty granted the museum almost 450,000 dollars and he developed a show that he called A New Sculpturalism. He brought in over 30 architects, including three he considered to be fathers of this “sculptural” approach – Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne and Eric Owen Moss. But the framing of the show upset several of the architects, among them Frank Gehry who pulled out of the show in spring, leading to a stalling of the show. After negotiations between the Getty, MOCA, Frank Gehry and some of the other architects, the show got back on track.
Thirty Years of Technological History Come to an End Just before 11:30 today East Coast Time, the voices of NASA were heard describing the launch of a Space Shuttle for the last time. As Atlantis took to the skies at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA marked the "sentimental journey into history." What did shuttle accomplished in 30 years? Was it a scientific success or a magnificent failure? We talk to one of the first women to work at NASA, who hoped to set foot on another planet. Is America's dream of space exploration out of date? Is it time to transfer the energy, imagination and resources into the problems we face here on Earth?
A Floating House for New Orleans When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans four years ago, the Ninth Ward was virtually wiped away. Despite new dikes and levees, few people doubt there will be more flooding to come. Today a new kind of house was unveiled in the Ninth Ward as a hedge against an uncertain future. Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne, known for buildings that are monumental in scale, has designed a house that can be mass produced, affordable. It also floats !
Changing the Face of Downtown Los Angeles The Cornfield is a 32-acre strip of open land bounded by North Broadway and North Spring Street in downtown LA between Chinatown and the Los Angeles River. It's across the 101 Freeway from Elysian Park. It never was really a cornfield at all, but when it was a railroad yard, cornstalks sprouted from seeds that spilled from boxcars. After the railroads moved out, there were protests against turning it into an industrial site, and the state parks department bought the property five years ago. It's now an " interim park ," with an amphitheater and four acres of open turf, awaiting the results of an international design competition . Tomorrow, State Parks Director Ruth Coleman will announce which of three landscape architectural competitors will be asked to draw final plans for a new state park.
Previewing James Comey's blockbuster testimony Former FBI director James Comey testifies Thursday in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, but his opening statement has been released. In it, he says he felt pressured by Donald Trump to declare loyalty to him and publicly clear him of any wrongdoing in the Russia investigation.
Claudio Magris: Blameless In Claudio Magris' Blameless, a museum of the implements of war and destruction is created to inspire peace. But this conversation is not just about war and peace.
Morgan Parker: There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé Morgan Parker says that the poems in her book There Are Things More Beautiful than Beyoncé take a stand against the clichés of the dominant culture.
Shaking up the USDA, 'The Beef Cookbook' and 'Tartine All Day' Peggy Lowe explains why Trump’s pick for USDA Secretary is rattling rural America. Dario Cecchini talks future plans for Chianti ramen, and Richard Turner shares cuts from “PRIME: The Beef Cookbook.” Writer Matthew Sedacca looks at the controversy behind liquid smoke. Jonathan Gold tries Chengdu-style dishes, and Elisabeth Prueitt of Tartine fills us in on the latest. Plus, chef Michael Beckman shares a recipe for cactus confit.