Sunday, 18. March 2007, 04:32:57
Thom Mayne
SAN FRANCISCO — It’s a good time to be Thom Mayne. A founder of the Los Angeles-based firm Morphosis, he has evolved from brash outsider into one of the country’s most celebrated architects in less than a decade by infusing his industrial-machine aesthetic with a slyly idiosyncratic sensibility. And he pulled that off while taking on an improbable mix of clients, including public school administrators and government bureaucrats.
His recently completed Federal Building in San Francisco is his most powerful government work to date, its slender form and perforated metal skin a clever play on notions of transparency in an era when the fear of terrorist attacks is prompting government agencies and corporations to turn their offices into armored compounds.
The building may one day be remembered as the crowning achievement of the General Services Administration’s Design Excellence program, founded more than a decade ago to remedy the atrocious architecture routinely commissioned for government offices. Under the leadership of Edward A. Feiner, the agency’s former chief architect, it has pushed through some of the most important civic buildings since the New Deal, including a stellar courthouse designed by Richard Meier in Islip, N.Y., and Mr. Mayne’s new federal courthouse in Eugene, Ore.
Since Mr. Feiner left the agency in 2005, some have fretted that the program may be unable to maintain that level of ambition, raising the prospect that the San Francisco building, which will be formally dedicated in July, might serve as a bookend to a heady phase of government-sponsored architecture.
Its 18-story structure rises on a choice site across from the city’s imposing federal courthouse, at the seam that divides the densely packed towers of the downtown civic center and financial district to the north, and the more rugged, horizontal landscape of the warehouse district to the south.
Playing off that contrast, the federal building offers two radically different faces to the city. On the north side, a stoical rectangular green-glass facade conjures landmarks of late Modernism like the United Nations in New York, with its conflicting messages of social progress and bureaucratic conformity. A series of delicate vertical glass fins serve as brises-soleils, adding an unexpected note of refinement.
That image of postwar Modernism turns out to be a trick, of course, and the hint is in a barely visible, uneven stainless steel screen curling just over the top of the building. As you walk toward its south end, the screen unfurls across the entire facade, finally lifting at the base of the building to create a canopy over the edge of a small public plaza.
The effect is mesmerizing. The texture of the screen shifts with the quality of the light, turning hard and gray as stone on bright days and more transparent when the light softens, allowing you to discern the skeletal frame underneath.
The delicacy of the composition is offset by a big, cube-shaped terrace that punctures the south facade. A narrow seam extending down one side of the cube continues across the plaza, like a tear across the building’s fabric. (As part of a permanent light installation conceived by the artist James Turrell, the cube will glow in various colors at night.)
The play between transparency and opacity plays up the porous relationship between inside and out, as if the federal bureaucracy had been pried open and reconnected to the world around it. Parts of the screen will open and close mechanically to regulate the light, further breaking down the facade’s uniformity and hinting at the busy and varied activity taking place inside.
As with all of Mr. Mayne’s work, this formal experimentation serves a heartfelt social agenda. Despite the high level of security the building demands, the architect forged a rich hierarchy of public zones. The concrete cylinder bollards that surround the plaza and protect it from car bombings are scattered in an informal pattern and double as stools; a cafe anchoring the southeast corner of the site will give government workers a chance to mingle with the masses at lunch hour.
The main entrance features a single tilting concrete column that braces one corner of the building, setting the entire composition slightly off balance. That effect is repeated in the lobby, framed by leaning columns that heighten the sense of the building’s looming weight above.
Like the plaza, the lobby is intended as a social mixing chamber. A staircase at the front descends to a day care center, a gym and a meeting room that will all be accessible to the public. A grand staircase anchoring the back draws you toward the elevator banks, which also serve as an informal seating area.
As you reach the top of the staircase and turn back toward the lobby, views of the busy lower level open up, including one of a playground. On the left side of the lobby, a long, faceted form that contains the upper-level offices shoots outward, punching through the front window and cantilevering over the street, smashing the boundary between inside and out.
Mr. Mayne’s nostalgia for Modernism reasserts itself in the elevator ride to the office floors. Modeled on the intricate skip-stop system that Le Corbusier invented for his 1952 Unité d’Habitation building in Marseilles, France, the elevators stop on alternate floors. From there, stairs lead up or down to big, loftlike spaces saturated with light.
The sense of airiness is magical. Protected by the perforated steel screen, the windows can be operated from inside, and when they are open, a cool breeze drifts through the space. Beautiful undulating concrete ceilings help channel the air from north to south, sensitizing us to the natural world waiting outside. (Unfortunately, some of this effect has been lost by the erection of a crude system of partitions and office cubicles.) Aside from the compositional inspiration, what the architect is clearly seeking to retrieve from Modernist forebears like Le Corbusier is an unflinching optimism. In a world where commercialism regularly trumps public service, Mr. Mayne seems to be telling us that the values of Old-World Modernism may not be so bad. Rather than obliterate this architectural past, he aims to imbue it with the human element that Modernism forgot, the quirks and odd delights that can root a building in personal and emotional territory.
The sad paradox is that this vision may be threatened, unless the Design Excellence program survives intact. The Federal Building was Mr. Feiner’s last major commission as director, and few architects believe that this level of ambition will survive his departure. Let’s hope they’re wrong, and that this project will inspire further daring government commissions.Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/arts/design/14mayn.html?pagewanted=1
Sunday, 24. December 2006, 02:05:22
Thom Mayne
By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: December 19, 2006
LOS ANGELES — 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,” Mr. Mayne, 62, said in an interview at Morphosis, his firm in Santa Monica. “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,” Mr. Mayne said. “It becomes metabolic, the skin. It moves.”
The centerpiece of a rethinking of La Défense, 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.
Mr. 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 The New York Times, 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.”
Mr. 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 Mr. 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, speaking with his usual intensity.
“I produce something, attack it, it moves, it changes, it responds to the nature of that critique,” he continued. “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, Mr. 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 Manhattan, where he designed a new engineering school and art studios, Mr. 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, N.J. (Enrique Norten won last week), and the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, to be designed by Richard Rogers.
Perhaps most stingingly, Mr. Mayne was dumped (his term) last year, in his own backyard, from the ambitious Grand Avenue project, a retail-commercial development by the Related Companies in downtown Los Angeles. (He was replaced by Frank Gehry.)
In response to such setbacks, Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Ind.” (Born in Waterbury, Conn., he moved to Tipton as an infant.)
“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 Mr. Mayne worked with what some might consider one of the most conservative clients of all: the United States 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, Ore.; and a satellite station for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration outside Washington.
“Obviously, those are buildings that require negotiation,” he said. “I couldn’t be too bad.”
Mr. 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. With the courthouse, for example, he spent an inordinate amount of time on the perforated metal privacy panels that attach to the judge’s benches.
“We had probably four meetings on the color, the height, the diameter,” Mr. Mayne said. “Multiply that times a thousand, and that’s what the project was.”
“It’s called maturity, I guess,” he added. “It’s not facility because you’re probably born with facility. You’re increasing your accessibility to options.”
As the options have multiplied, so has his workload; Mr. Mayne continues to log long hours with no respite in sight. “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.”
He and his wife of 25 years, Blythe, are not intent on amassing creature comforts: they live in the same 1,400-square-foot house where they raised their children, now 23 and 19.
“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 “institionalizing,” Mr. 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.”
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