Quotes by Thom Mayne

About Thom Mayne:

Thom Mayne is a Los Angeles-based architect. Mayne helped found the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in 1972, where he is a trustee. Since then he has held teaching positions at SCI-Arc, the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is principal of Morphosis, an architectural firm in Santa Monica, California. Mayne received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in March 2005.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The age of recalcitrance is over. The best solution is no longer just to regurgitate a 19th-century design.

Thom Mayne

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.

Thom Mayne

But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour.

Thom Mayne

The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.

Thom Mayne

Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That's the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do.

Thom Mayne

I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don't have to understand it. You may not like it. That's OK.

Thom Mayne

I have a preference for rough architecture, real, inexpensive, unfinished.

Thom Mayne

Architecture is a result of a process of asking questions and testing them and re-interrogating and changing in a repetitive way.

Thom Mayne

Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of t...

Thom Mayne

In architecture, you arrive so late. I look at doctors, lawyers I know, and they're all buying boats and bailing out at 62. My career is just getting started.

Thom Mayne

I don't know any architects that I respect who don't have their own voice. I think the difference between architecture and the other arts is your immersion in reality.

Thom Mayne

I believe that artistic activities change people. You do effect change. I see architecture as a political, social and cultural act - that is its primary role.

Thom Mayne

You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.

Thom Mayne

Architecture is a negotiated art, and it's highly political, and if you want to make buildings, there is diplomacy required.

Thom Mayne

I've always been interested in an architecture of resistance - architecture that has some power over the way we live. Working under adversarial conditions could be seen as a plus because you're offering alternatives. Still, there are situations that ...

Thom Mayne

Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.

Thom Mayne

I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture. 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 authentic...

Thom Mayne

Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that.

Thom Mayne

Architecture is the story of how we see ourselves. It is the architect's job to service everyday life.

Thom Mayne

The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.

Thom Mayne

It's too simplistic to advance the notion of the autonomy of art as a reason for turning away from the public. You can have autonomy and simultaneously have connections with the social and political world.

Thom Mayne

Author Bio

  • NameThom Mayne
  • DescriptionAmerican architect (b.1944)
  • BornJanuary 19, 1944
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionArchitect
  • AwardsPritzker Architecture Prize