Thom Mayne

Recorded on January 27, 2026. Read a transcript at the bottom of the page.

Thom Mayne founded Morphosis in Los Angeles in 1972. Beginning five decades ago with speculative research and experimental drawings, Mayne’s work bridges the gap between the avant-garde and the complexities of large-scale public infrastructure and now encompasses urban plans, civic institutions, and large-scale public buildings, all driven by a commitment to collective practice and environmental performance.

Mayne has held teaching positions at SCI-Arc—which he co-founded in 1972—as well as Columbia, Yale, Harvard, UCLA, the Berlage Institute, and the AA. He received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2005 and the AIA Gold Medal in 2013.

Morphosis has been the subject of 34 monographs. Its work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMOMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Centre Pompidou. Recent projects include the Bloomberg Center at Cornell Tech, the Orange County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Federal Building, the Vialia Vigo station in Spain, and the NOAA Satellite Operations Facility. Currently, Morphosis is working on the new U.S. Embassies in Riyadh and Beirut.

Beyond his architectural practice, Mayne directs the NOW Institute, an interdisciplinary urban research center, and operates Stray Dog Cafe, an art and research studio in Los Angeles.

About I Would Prefer Not To

Conceived and produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab and presented with The Architectural League, I Would Prefer Not To¹Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” The Piazza Tales (1856). tackles a usually unexamined subject: the refusal of an architectural commission. Why do architects make the decision to forfeit the possibility of work? At what point is a commission not worth it? When in one’s career is it necessary to make such a decision? Whether concealed out of politeness or deliberately shielded from public scrutiny, architects’ refusals usually go unrecorded by history, making them difficult to analyze or learn from. In this series of recorded interviews, I Would Prefer Not To aims to shed light on the complex matrix of agents, stakeholders, and circumstances implicated in every piece of architecture. The podcast won the 2025 AIA Architecture in Media Award, a prize recognizing contributions that elevate and challenge architectural discourse.

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Transcript

This transcript was created using speech-to-text AI software and was lightly edited for continuity. The text may not accurately capture all information or aspects of the conversation.

Ana Miljački  00:22

Hello and thank you for tuning in. I am Ana Miljački, Professor of Architecture at MIT and director of the Critical Broadcasting Lab. And on behalf of the Architectural League of New York and the Critical Broadcasting Lab, I welcome you to our architecture podcast series titled I Would Prefer Not To.

I Would Prefer Not To is an oral history project conducted through audio interviews on the topic of perhaps the most important kind of refusal in architects’ toolboxes: refusal of the architectural commission. By definition, the topic of refusal stays hidden from public scrutiny and thus also hidden from history. Withdrawals of this kind tend not to leave paper trails and are not easy to examine or learn from, and yet the lessons contained in architects’ deliberations about—and decisions not to engage—are politically relevant and urgent. Decisions to not engage a commission, or types of commissions, or commissions with certain characteristics, inevitably forfeit potential profit, placing other values above it, at least momentarily. My guest in this episode is Thom Mayne. Welcome, Thom.

Thom Mayne 01:30

Pleasure to be here.

Miljački 01:33

It is no small task to fit Thom Mayne’s biography into this introduction. We will start with the fateful year of 1972, as it marked the simultaneous launch of Morphosis and of SCI-Arc. Thom Mayne founded Morphosis as a collective practice engaged in design, architecture, and urbanism with Michael Brickler, Livio Santini, and James Stafford; they were joined by Michael Rotondi in 1975.

Fifty years later, current partners Arne Emerson, Ung-Joo Scott Lee, Brandon Welling, and Eui-Sung Yi lead the office of 50-plus employees in collaboration with Thom Mayne, while he also runs Stray Dog Cafe as an art and research studio that stages various events and exchanges in LA, and he directs the interdisciplinary NOW Institute as part of Morphosis. Co-founding SCI-Arc with a group of friends the same year as his studio would become symptomatic of the way Thom Mayne’s work and teaching have been entangled across his career as an architect, an educator, and an instigator.

Since SCI-Arc, he has held distinguished teaching positions at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Berlage, the Bartlett, and the AA, and was a tenured professor at UCLA between 1993 and 2019. Both projects—practicing and teaching architecture—have been consistently described by Mayne as requiring collective engagement, which he explicitly highlighted in his Pritzker Prize acceptance speech in 2005. In his career, he has received very many awards besides the Pritzker, including 29 Progressive Architecture awards and over 120 AIA awards. He was also the recipient of the Rome Prize in ’87, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ 1992 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, the Chrysler Design Award of Excellence in 2001, the AIA Gold Medal in 2013, and others.

His office’s works have been widely exhibited at MoMA, SFMOMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Centre Pompidou, among others. All of Mayne’s artwork produced over the course of his 50-year career, the work of Morphosis, and Thom Mayne has been the subject of 34 monographs.

Morphosis started with speculative work, experimental drawings, and private homes in the 1970s and early 1980s. It has more recently been involved in delivering large public buildings and urban plans for civic and academic institutions and clients in the US and abroad. There are way too many of these to list them all, but just some of the recent projects include the Bloomberg Center at Cornell Tech, the Judy Genshaft Honors College at the University of South Florida, the Performance Hall at UT Dallas, the Orange County Museum of Art, the U.S. Land Port of Entry at Alexandria, the Vialia Vigo station in Spain, Casablanca Finance City Tower, and others.

Mayne has been involved with a number of important federal projects through the Design Excellence Program, which I would love to talk about today a little more generally. Forthcoming among those projects are embassies in Riyadh and Beirut. He has also been engaged in new experiments in drawing, and we will touch on some of this work and research in detail if we can get to it. But as always, we will start with the work that is “not on the board,” so to speak, at the office.

So, as you know, Thom, I have been opening these conversations with a question about the most memorable decision to not engage or to drop a commission, or a decision to shape the practice in such a way that it does not include certain types of commissions. So, could we start with that? And maybe we start with it and keep coming back to it in some way throughout the conversation.

Mayne 05:35

Terrific. It’s interesting. My instinct is to always take things and to somehow make them work. From the very beginning of practicing—having some awareness of the uniqueness of practicing in Los Angeles, and having gone to undergraduate school at USC—having people like Craig Ellwood and Gregory Ain, the Case Study people, I had a kind of realism of what it meant to practice in Los Angeles.

And it started with practices that were more or less residential. And this is a ways back, but even at 18, 19, or 20 years old, I somehow just… it was an instinct that my interests were in larger projects, and my thinking was connected to more complicated types of work, which was going to lead me to the urban. But at the same time, there was a somewhat—let’s say—naive optimism of the goals of architecture in a much more kind of pure form, outside of all the contentious, contingent realities that our profession has to withstand.

And I was interested in locating architecture within the terms of the profession itself, and it led me definitely away from developer work that I had no interest in taking—and I never did.

Miljački  07:19

But my sense is that the way you think about clients and commissions has been transforming over the decades of your practice, and we can use it, perhaps, to talk about the whole arc.

There were a couple of articles in different New York Times issues in 2005 around the Pritzker, and you spoke about your clients in the first 25 years of the practice not returning to you in one of these articles—but then also, in the other one, about the important lessons in negotiating and collaborating with clients. So I’m wondering if you can tell us about this sort of—maybe we can call it a learning curve—and how it impacted the work, or vice versa: how the work impacted that conception of who’s on the other side?

Mayne 08:08

Wow, that’s interesting. I’m coming out of school, and my heroes are all troublemakers. They’re the Raimund Abrahams and the James Stirlings and—well, even worse than that—they’re the Frank Zappas and the Miles Davises, and they’re the Paul Austers and the Milan Kunderas; they’re all going to be troublemakers.

And I was not very sophisticated in my relationship with clients; if anything, I saw them as kind of the enemy to be dealt with. I’m not very sophisticated socially, and that took me quite a while—and it was, let’s say, quite difficult in this country. That would be a whole other conversation, because I look back and realize being a US architect is incredibly differentiated from many places in the world. But there was a time where I could kind of get by with that, and then I could become part of an art community.

And again, I would have said that in this country, architects are seen as a profession more parallel to medicine and engineering and law. And I saw it as an art form. There was no question in my mind that I was parallel: if I’m listening to Herbie Hancock or Laurie Anderson, I’m shaping physical space versus shaping sound. I saw myself as part of the art world, and then you realize architects have very little control of their own lives—your world goes in a certain direction just based on how you pick up the phone and who’s on the phone.

And oddly, I ended up starting to do serious public commissions based on certain people who somehow adopted me or were interested in what I had to say, regardless of my attitude—regardless of how you might see the problematic nature of that, right? And it led to work that was, by its nature, collaborative.

But I have to say, behind all this—and that notion of how the world perceived me—I’ve always been a collaborative person. In my own studio, we can talk in a more direct sense. That might be seen as confrontational, but it’s just absolutely normal in uncovering a problem: the directness and the kind of toughness you have to have to investigate that problem, right? And the kind of openness that has to take place in the conversation.

Miljački  10:50

I definitely want to talk about the way that works in the office in a second, but maybe before we get there, I also want to get back to LA for a second. You have spoken about the importance and vibrancy of cities, and of architects contributing to cities in various ways; I’ve listened now to many, many talks in preparation, and that is somewhere in the background of everything. But this is maybe another “arc” question about LA: How did you see LA when you started, and how do you see it now?

Mayne  11:26

That’s a complex one. Well, I’m showing up here at ten years old from Chicago. I’m a city kid, and I show up here as a young boy—and I’m looking backwards now, this isn’t something I was aware of at ten. I’m not fitting in, because this is a town where a young man had to be good at sports and had to do certain things, and that’s not me. I look like I should be, because I’m 6’5″ and I look healthy, etc., but I’m completely uncoordinated—not a sports guy at all—and it was very rough for me as a young man.

I get to college, and it’s the first time I’m around people that have interests—men, especially—who are interested in the artistic or whatever, and I’m finding a kind of belonging. Skipping now to a broader discussion: it is, and it was, a unique place, particularly within this period of the late ’60s and ’70s. There was a collaboration happening, and I’m not even totally aware of it at the time—it’s just what’s around me, right? There’s nothing unusual about it; it’s taken for granted.

And now it’s going to be immense, because I’m going to be listening to Frank Zappa, and I realize I’m in a crowd where I’m one of the few people that’s not a musician—because he’s an extraordinary kind of character—and you name it: the Patti Smiths, the Laurie Andersons, and the Herbie Hancocks. I could go back and remember certain concerts where Herbie Hancock is playing and I’m 22 or 23 years old. It’s film, and it’s this explosion that was taking place here.

Then I’m directly moving out of school into Venice, and the Ed Ruschas are my neighbors. There’s a group of young architects there, and none of us knew each other, but we’re starting to get connected, and we’re all teaching. As you mentioned, I’m involved in starting a school [SCI-Arc] only four years out of school, and I’m starting a firm as a default. I’m not a good employee, and the “other thing” doesn’t work for me.

So again, it required just an incredible kind of naive optimism to stumble into this. But you could do that here in LA—you could find a place. There was a group of people working here, so it was a unique time in Los Angeles in creative terms, right? In terms of the kind of conversations taking place.

And then what has to be discussed, too, in architecture: UCLA is just appearing—that’s 1968—and I am a fourth-year student, making trips over to UCLA and finding it much more interesting than where I am the last two years. I’m meeting Peter Cook and Ron Herron and Chalk and Greene—it’s where my name [Morphosis] comes from. I’m getting the comic books, and I’m now aware of the AA [Architectural Association], and there’s a direct connection now between LA and the AA.

Morphosis comes out of the collective idea. Years later, I’m meeting Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au, and he’s at the AA—same location for the name. All of us had this notion of an architectural practice more similar to cinema, that required a large collective practice of multiple skill sets and disciplinary interests that had to do with the complexity of architecture parallel to film as an art form, right? And we’re all challenging the auteur; we’re all challenging the singularity of the artist, which we saw as very “old school”—very 19th century.

It was a very unique little period that I entered out of school, and I look at it now as an absolutely unique time—a very, very unusual moment. And of course, there was an immediate dialogue between LA and New York, and there was a kind of beginning of a takeover, where LA was now getting its share of recognition vis-à-vis New York, which was the dominant center of all the arts.

Miljački  16:09

But are there moments in the story of LA that are relevant for the story of Morphosis, other than 1968 and now? Are there other moments that either—

Mayne  16:23

These are forming your conversations; they’re forming your interests. I couldn’t separate the nature of my very particular definitions of architecture from the nurturing that took place through these conversations. There’s no question that I’m, on some level, a product of this environment—and this environment in a very particular moment of history.

There was a group of us architects; we were all teaching, and most of us were either at SCI-Arc or UCLA, and I’m having weekly conversations on juries for decades. We can finish each other’s sentences. We can continue our arguments indefinitely. And so there was very much a continuous dialogue through the academy, and that became absolutely essential: the connection between architects who were also part of the academic world.

Miljački 17:30

You’ve done a lot of work, and it’s organized on the firm’s website in these categories that I found really interesting: Architecture, Planning, Tangents, and Research. Maybe “Tangents” throws it all off a little bit, but they seem like typologies of commissions—though they’re also speaking to perhaps an internal organization of the studio. I’m interested in both of those, or at least in both of them separately, but also how they might be in dialogue.

Mayne  18:03

They’re definitely all connected. They’re very different outputs of thinking. Starting off in the very beginning, I wasn’t able to get commissions—much less commissions of the type that I needed to explore the work. So I’m working through drawings, and I’m working through conceptual models. It becomes very clear to me from the beginning that this was my project: that I’m understood in terms of the ideas I bring forth in architecture.

If I’m contributing to those ideas, it’s through drawings, to some degree through words—although it’s not my medium—and the work itself through unbuilt work. I was in a time where you could do that, because it was going to take a decade or so before I was making any serious effort or any serious resolve in built work. And so that “abstract thing” becomes the basis of all of our work, and it still is. In fact, I’m spending more time now going back and working at the abstract level, because I’m trying to reconsider certain directions, and it starts through the drawings, which is a method of thinking.

There is an absolute seamlessness between the conceptual work and the building work. In fact, there have been many times when, if the project is having difficulty in its reality, I’d prefer to actually stop and be responsible for the project in drawing form—in conceptual form—than in a built form that no longer is interesting to me if it can’t maintain a certain kind of credibility to those ideas.

I should say that I only had very little experience with other architects. One was Roland Coate. If you actually went back to look at him, he was a very interesting character; I worked there for about six months. And then I was with Gruen Associates. Gruen was the watering hole in LA at the time. Victor Gruen was an unusual character who ran a highly intellectual, conceptual place. I was there for two years, and that definitely nurtured my interest in planning.

But when I left to take a position teaching—which was going to lead to SCI-Arc—it [the office] operated at a very high level in terms of policy and developing conceptual ideas of the city, but the final product I found really disturbing. It became evident then—I was literally, at that time, still deciding who I was going to be when I grew up—that I was much more oriented towards architecture, because I was finally interested in the final product.

Miljački 21:06

Yeah, so what I’m hearing is that these categories have geographic repercussions, or they map onto specific geographies. But I’m also wondering if they involve different skillsets in the office.

Mayne 21:20

I remember being quite young, and I was watching what happened in the ’90s, and all the local firms kind of disappeared. You had to be national just to survive as an office. And then another ten years later, in the early 2000s, realizing, “Oh dear, we can’t even survive even at a moderate-sized office of 25 to 35 people.” You’re international.

And again, in my generation, it is really evident to us that we had to work internationally, but we were teaching internationally and the publications are international. We’re known as well internationally as we are nationally, but we’re also moving around the world and lecturing, etc. We’ve absorbed that already. Now the majority of our work… my—one of my first biggest projects was in Austria, and it’s one of the projects that launched me: the Hypo Alpe Adria Bank. And so very early on, I’m already kind of part of an international… our first three urban competitions were all in Europe. They were in Vienna and Paris, right? I’d say it’s a little more complicated kind of condition today.

Miljački  22:33

Well, I have a question—maybe it’s one more about the “arc” of Morphosis and of the body of work. I thought that somehow we would get from those speculative architectural projects from the early ’70s and the private residences to the larger scale—that somehow there is obviously a pivot. And maybe you’ve just described it as needing to go international, I’m not sure. But clearly the current, contemporary work—or the last 20 years of it—is at a very different scale than the early work. And it is built. It is urban, it is very public.

I am wondering if we can talk about how that jump or transformation occurred in the office. To what extent this is also a kind of learning about how to engage clients, and to what extent it’s potentially an introduction of different tools in the office, but also just reorienting? It seems like a reorienting, right?

Mayne  23:45

Well, some of the urban competitions happened when I was quite young, and they were done simultaneously to little cafes and the little work we were getting at the time, right? And we were a “boutique” office or whatever, and we were connected to people like Steven Holl at the time, and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and those kind of people. The interest was always there; it came just inherently in terms of my own interest, and it definitely was nurtured with Richard Rogers.

But somehow I was aware that the way my brain works—and my interest in organizational ideas—operated at an urban level. My first goal… it made sense that I’m not meant to be building houses; that’s how my brain is functioning. I’m interested in much more complex problems. I’m interested in integrative problems—the relationship between things more than the thing itself.

But it’s happening through the competitions. So at some point in this process, this interim process, certain people recognize that, and you just get an opportunity to do something. I had certain people that kind of “adopted” me and allowed me… and we did the Caltrans project [District 7 Headquarters]. It was one of my first large projects, and it was a square block. People had decided that I was a person who was interested in urbanism and gave me… I ended up winning this competition. And it was actually Enrique Norten and it was a nice competition with Rem Koolhaas, etc. And then right after that, there was one for the Cathedral—the Moneo one [Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels]—and we made it to the end of that list.

I was meeting people that decided I was a person interested in urbanism, and then there was a huge shift: I was somewhat “adopted” by the Chief Architect of the United States [Ed Feiner]. All of a sudden, I’m doing federal buildings in San Francisco and courthouses, etc. And again, I’m in a profession where I’ve never called a client. The phone rings; somebody asks you to do a project. I have no ability to look for work—I don’t play golf with people. Certain people recognized those interests, and then you take them.

We did a project in Cincinnati [University of Cincinnati Campus Recreation Center], which was the first kind of really urban project—not just architecture—and we were interested in that. It showed up in the work that the work finally was even less “architecture” than it was urbanism. It was about connective tissue.

We were going through a huge shift. At the time, we were very much focused as “object makers” and “highly formal.” And that was negative, by the way—as is “starchitecture.” I mean, that was something used to try to hold you down. And we were being recognized that actually, that’s not who we were; that’s how people wanted to talk about the work. We were kind of connected to certain people because our formal language had to do with… you could label this as part of the “radical” whatever, because it was aggressively challenging things in its formal structure, and it was interested in certain things like “fragment versus whole.” I was kind of rethinking what coherency was. But anyway, it was becoming acknowledged that we were relationship-connected—they were interested in urban ideas.

Miljački  27:41

I’ll definitely ask you more about the Design Excellence Program, because it seems like it had a very important role. But having watched a number of lectures in rapid succession, the thing that stood out for me—and you’ve already brought it up in our conversation so far—was how consistently you talk about the collective work of Morphosis and your own role in it as a member or as a director.

And you know, this might be captivating to me because I’m interested in finding ways to talk about co-authorship in architecture. I’m a perfect audience for that statement; whenever it comes up, I just light up. Morphosis is currently around 50 people—though it says 80 and 50, both numbers, or we counted 50 on your website, but it says 80—and I would love for us to talk about the procedures by which you communicate in the office. You know, the kind of pragmatic everyday life of the office: both how you communicate about the various lines of research that are happening and about the realities of running the office.

I’m interested in this both historically and now, but because you’re this size now, it is particularly, I think, important. Or maybe there are a couple of moments in the life of the studio that you think are worth discussing in terms of organization and communication—how that dimension of the office has transformed with the transformation of its size, or with time.

Mayne 29:19

Oh dear. This would be like trying to explain psychoanalysis; I’m not sure it’s possible. I require discourse and conversation. It’s both directly connected to moving a person or a team in a certain direction—so I have to steer the ship—and it’s also hugely important to me to get pushback, to get feedback for my own thinking.

I remember having long talks about this with people like Lebbeus Woods, who could go off into a forest by himself. He was a completely singular character and needed nobody. And I’m going, “Oh, I couldn’t operate that way.” I absolutely have to have people to have a conversation with. I’m challenging my own ideas and kind of pushing things, and I’m getting information back, which is incredibly important for me.

But after that, I think I’m a hybrid: I’m macro/micro. I’m looking at a larger idea, and it’s possible that in that conversation taking place, it has led the project. So when I lecture, I try to say “we” instead of “I,” because I don’t care where the idea comes from. It came through the dialogue, and I can’t remember—I don’t really care about it. But on the other hand, I’m also going to come in and do the most micro: I’m going to touch every kind of little piece of it. So I kind of have both things going on.

Miljački  30:46

But, I mean, you’re certainly talking about sort of how ideas are massaged into place, right? But I’m also wondering, when it comes to commissions—that commission comes to you, it seems like they call you—but do you discuss this with the firm, with the whole team? Is there a way that they understand… that everyone in the atmosphere understands the logic by which Morphosis is able to sustain itself?

Mayne  31:14

From the very beginning, I’ve always had a very open studio and no privacy. I sit at the exact same desk everybody else does. Other than certain unusual, very private conversations, I’m at my desk and people can hear me. I’ve moved people around purposely, cheek by jowl, in terms of the people I’m interested in communicating with.

Some of it has to do with the nature of the job, and some of it has to do with the nature of the personality, and I’m highly aware of that. This is where maybe my academic world and my professional world join, because the studios are just about inseparable in terms of the way I set up—the way I think about the academic and the professional. I’m trying to be very aware of the character I’m working with: kind of who they are, what’s important to them, and where they are in their trajectory.

But after that, it’s just incredibly relaxed. We’re just dealing with a problem and talking about it. I’m bringing people in because I admire their intelligence and their abilities; that’s why they’re there to begin with. And one of my jobs is to keep the studio very relaxed so people can operate in their prime, right?

But it’s hard to answer this because it’s very natural. It’s just… but it’s definitely about trying to keep the office as transparent as possible. When I was very young, I was very aware that I wanted the young ones to hear the arguments with the clients. This is not the simplest thing in the world: there are other things going on here, and it’s not “pure design.” The contingent is everything—to be able to move through that, to realize it versus the drawings.

And again, I’m a somewhat shy person. I haven’t been a social person my whole life. In some ways, I’m the most comfortable when I’m working on my drawings and my own things. To get them out in the world, it’s like, “Oh dear, here it goes.” And it’s going to be difficult to maintain the things I want to keep.

It took a long time—and I’m not sure if it’s maturity or giving up—before I realized that I’m compromising in all the work. It doesn’t get to be “my” work. It is always “our” work, and some of the “our” is the contingent stuff that I’m not pleased with. It’s this reality, right? And in most cases, strangely, the reality that’s least solvable isn’t financial—it’s personal. Yeah.

Miljački  34:07

In preparation, I read a short article by you on the San Francisco Federal Building and its material and construction strategies—a project of optimizing this building’s climatic performance, basically. I’ve listened to you talk about material intelligence, climate, cost, and all of these things swirling around a specific problem in a specific kind of commission. But I’m wondering what you would say are the key topics that drive contemporary Morphosis work—the key topics apart from the search and research that may be formal and organizational?

Mayne  34:52

It’s interesting. When you talk about San Francisco, some of it seems so incredibly straightforward. I can envision—literally—that first day. I’m sitting around a table, and I’ve got my design team. We’ve just put a design team together, and it includes Arup engineering.

We had just finished the Diamond Ranch High School and came up with some very… we really, really pushed that project into an environmental area, into a landscape, etc. And so I’m working with a team of engineers that were conversing in a certain direction of where we’re going. I remember just having this really casual conversation.

The San Francisco Federal Building—we saw it as a competition. We saw some of the other people, and they filled the site; we were the only one that left the courtyard. But that’s interesting, because we’re the kind of “radical” architects, and we’re saying, “No, you have to have a public space.” And so, okay—we’re looking at the climate, and in my own knowledge of San Francisco, it’s an interesting climate. It’s this benign, kind of really equal climate; it’s coastal.

We just finished pushing certain ideas with the school in LA, and came up with a very, very different kind of direction where the building was more landscape than building. You might say that we were finding a new hybrid between landscape and architecture. We were starting to explore a whole definition where landscape was now primary, right? And it was going to become, in itself, architecturalized.

And I’m asking him—Bruce—”Can we take out the air conditioning?” We’re working under the Bush administration in Texas. And again, I’m connecting that to my political interests. I’m going, “This will be interesting. This is our first project for the U.S. of A., and it’s the GSA headquarters.” And instead, it seems like publicness, attitude towards the environment, and attitude towards the workplace would be our thing.

I’m starting to develop a direction, and it’s not “architectural”—the direction we’re going to take. It’s going to be Nancy Pelosi as our client. We already knew, through getting the project, that we were problematic: we’re the radical LA office that’s going to muck around with San Francisco, and there’s all kinds of articles in the paper already condemning us. We haven’t started work yet, right? “Thom Mayne, this weird guy in LA, is going to mess up our city.”

And I’m sitting there going, “No, no, no—let’s listen.” We’re going to start with a set of directions that has nothing to do with a formal idea. It’ll be public space, it’ll be environment, it’ll be the workforce. We immediately go to work, and we change the workforce: we take the staff and put them by the windows, and put the manager in the middle—not in the corner window. We give them a Harvard Business Study and say, “This is a modern workforce.” And it was the biggest change in the building, actually—politically, making that change was huge.

Then we made the Plaza, which was obvious. It’s the Mission District, and it’s going to be the center of a new kind of area of the city. And it’s going to be environment, and we’re going to “take the air.” Bruce says, “Let’s look at it.” Lawrence Livermore Labs, Berkeley, and Arup spent a year—it wasn’t simple. First building in the United States where we took the air conditioning out.

Skip to the opening. I’m with Nancy Pelosi, and she hates the building. She wants a Victorian building. I go, “Nancy, it’s kind of hard to build a 14-story Victorian building.” And by the way, it was built for a very tight budget, etc. But it does this: it powers 1,200 homes—the delta, right? And it produces a plaza for a city that’s famous for its social structure, etc. And, oh, by the way, the workforce: we put the worker with the views of this place. And then, instead of a museum, we put a childcare center, because 55% of the staff here are women. Done deal.

I said, “Pretend like you’re looking at the lunar landing module.” And then after you talk about it a bit—whether you like it or not, right? But anyway, does that make sense? The point being: I’m talking about going back to the strategizing on each project. You’re looking at specific work, and it starts an argument, and it’s prior to the formal investigation. It establishes the terms of the conversation with your staff, because after that, the various alternatives you’re looking at are now based on an agreement that this is the project we’re going to pursue.

We’ve made an agreement with the client on things we agree upon that are not subjective. Because when you get to the next part, you’re not going to please a large collective client on the “look” of the thing—on the physiognomy. That’s not possible. That’s also changing the whole policy of an office—developing an office that started with these little projects that are more or less based on an aesthetic, and now changing radically how you approach work with a more complex public client that has to operate within broader terms. It doesn’t start with aesthetics.

Miljački  40:18

I’m trying to extrapolate the values that are important in the story you just described. To me, it seemed like there was a social dimension to the project that you were interested in—both in terms of the public urban infrastructure and the internal programmatic offerings. And there is a dimension that is really about the climate crisis, trying to deal with that and reorient the profession with this “experiment in building,” right?

But I’m wondering—and I don’t know if I’m putting words in your mouth—if these are values that are held by the office, that you discuss together, along with other preoccupations of a different nature. And then, to what extent do you disclose these preoccupations to clients as you approach them? Or is it case-by-case? Does every commission come with its own set of questions that you prioritize as needed?

Mayne 41:30

Basically, I think there’s no question that the office understands these basic values of the firm. Strangely enough, I think if you looked at how the world perceives us, and if you go on the website, it actually says that this is a group of people that has consistently, and very early on, been involved in environmental issues; that are interested in the contextual issues of urban location; that are interested in the context itself as a generator of ideas; and there seems to be a consistency of social notions that would place us on the “left” of the spectrum, right? We could locate the firm at that position.

I would put the question back to you in terms of how we’re perceived, but I think there’s no question. It’s funny—I’m looking at the secondary image here [to his partner] Eui-Sung, and if you ask the younger generation, that’d be another question mark. Architects tend to always want to reinvent themselves instead of building on what’s there, right? They all kind of want to erase the people in front of them and invent something new, versus building on something. We have to see what’s going to happen in the next decade, because we seem to be at an impasse right now.

We haven’t talked about the enormous shift in the mechanism of how we work during the span of my career. I’m “old school”—I was drawing on a drafting board, drawing with ink and pencil, and working within extremely simplistic terms compared to how we work today. That both limited us and opened up certain opportunities.

Starting in the mid-90s—1994 to be exact—we’re working with the digital world, and it’s moving at the speed of light. We’re now in what we could say is “third-generation digital.” And now, with the digital, we’re entering AI, etc., and there’s an enormous shift taking place. Connected to your conversation about the trajectory of the office from small, simple projects to large urban projects: these tools are absolutely essential in this development.

We didn’t talk about it, but the embassies are both small villages—they’re little pieces of cities. They’re enormous projects. And the work we’re doing in China—a lot of that large-scale work—requires the nature of these complex tools that allow us to deal with this level of complexity. It also has an effect on the conversations you have with the personalities. It’s a very different set of interactions that is in process. I can’t tell you more other than things are changing, because the nature of these tools affects our interaction without any question, right?

Miljački  44:29

You mean the AI tools, the contemporary…

Mayne  44:33

[Regarding] the AI tools and the computer themselves, which individualized somehow… and there’s actually a discussion of even location, which would be a completely separate topic: more and more now, people are operating [with] percentages in their own environment, or percentages in the studio.

Miljački  44:52

I don’t know—you might find this a strange way to pose a question—but I wanted to ask you if the way in which you think about the various values that are important for the office influences the way you think about commissions, sort of? Both the things that you say “yes” to, or the things that you would like to pursue as a project, on one end.

On the other end—maybe this is a question about a relationship with clients again, or types of clients—I’m also interested in this: when you started talking about the mechanics of work, I thought you might also talk about the particular kinds of relationships, and even legal structures, through which you encounter different clients. And the logic by which the contract plays a role in contemporary work.

I’m really talking about the kind of… you know, there’s the standard AIA contract that, in the US, governs the kinds of things that the architect is responsible for and owns as intellectual property. But also beyond that, the logics by which we can disclose what we’re working on or not, that might be globally available.

Mayne 46:15

Non-disclosure [agreements]—those are all somewhat secondary to me. They’re just part of the contingent world that I have to deal with. They are resistances. In some ways, I’m pretty straightforward: I’m interested in the project, and the direct notion of the project from its beginning initiation towards its resolution. Everything else is somehow part of the contingent world that represents resistance I have to solve.

And it’s the heavy lifting of architecture, for sure. It’s proved to be most difficult in this country for me—that there’s the most resistance to creative thinking, even. There is a real, profound power in capital. And so the conversations tend to be quite simple; they have to do with budgetary responses that get in the way of the more interesting conversations of opportunities. There are less and less people that actually are interested in talking about architecture. It has to do with something much more mundane, much simpler.

It’s funny—I’m here heading a studio, and it sounds irresponsible for me not to be able to answer these questions in sophisticated terms, but those are the ones I delegate, frankly. I’m least interested in them, but I’m very, very aware of the difficulty. Especially in this country, it connects to something else.

You ask where we’re working today. I think if you talk to architects in general today, a whole lot of us are in certain places because that’s where the opportunities exist for any kind of exploration, for any kind of innovation. We didn’t choose to be in these places; they are places that are now asking for innovation. It’s in the Middle East—so we’re going to be in Abu Dhabi, and we’re going to be in Qatar, etc., etc.—or we’re going to be someplace in China or Vietnam or Malaysia or Korea.

It’s really been fascinating. In the last decade, you meet all your buddies depending on certain cities. I remember in ’89, Japan was bringing in all kinds of architects from around the world. I’m meeting all these people—meeting a Michael Graves for the first time, or [Richard] Meier—and I’m, whatever, 29 or 30 years old. I’m meeting them in the Akasaka Prince in Tokyo, right? I can look back now and see these locations moving around the world at different times.

You become, in some ways, a cultural anthropologist. You get a view of the world, and architecture represents these moments of time when they’re exploring urban conditions, and how that architecture symbolizes their sense of where they are at the moment. In the case of innovation, or any kind of exploration, it means that they’re looking for the “present of the future,” right? And it becomes very clear to you.

So the location has very much to do with just a global condition and what’s taking place. Right now, of course, we’re in a very active period of history in terms of the distribution of wealth and power globally, and we’re in the middle of that. Of course, now we’re suffering the consequences of that at the moment. But in your problem—that we probably don’t want to go there—what’s taking place in this country right now would be absolutely connected to the nature, the status of the office, and the inescapability of being a political… impossible.

Miljački  50:16

An inescapability or impossibility?

Mayne 50:20

Impossibility, yeah. Political, of course. And you have to do that with some care in this culture.

Miljački  50:31

I have a few more important questions. So if you have energy, I would like to ask you: How are the NOW Institute and the Stray Dog Cafe related to the Morphosis output? It seems like a fascinating ecology of different studio personalities.

Mayne  50:53

I had just left SCI-Arc for a while and was starting my work at UCLA. I had a person who was interested in urban exploration—especially in LA—and they helped me start the NOW Institute in financial terms. We published the first edition that first year, and it kind of took off. During my 15 or 20 years at UCLA, I was running the NOW Institute, and then we took that to Madrid and to Penn and various places doing urban projects.

It all started from my academic world. I became more and more interested in the idea that architects in education were not dealing with urban issues and were focused on architectural and formal issues. Which is strange, as I’m connected to that in some way, I guess. But the compelling problems of the 21st century were urban and infrastructural, not architecture. There will always be a need for architects—that’s not an issue—but it’s not the most compelling problem. It started from just that simple impulse, and I’ve maintained that for the last 25 years. It’s been a little bit dormant the last five years, and I’m just kind of ramping that up again.

As for Stray Dog [Cafe/Studio]—I’m an 82-year-old guy, and I want to make some changes. I want to reinvent some things, and I need some privacy. I was complaining to my wife years ago that I wanted my “little funky studio” back, with four or five young people, like when I was just starting and dead broke and living in Venice. And she said, “Thom, what’s holding you back?”

I’m in my little studio now doing more personal, experimental work. There was a saying for years: “Fire everybody every three years.” I understood it, but I was in my 70s when I finally got it. Your own office knows how to do something, and they know how to do it at a high level—and it’s not what I want to do. What wakes me up in the morning is to figure out something new to do, and I need a new environment to do that. I need young people who don’t have an answer yet—I’m looking at these [colleagues], smiling at Julian waving at me—who ask much more basic “why the sky is blue” kind of questions. I want to ask those same questions. I don’t need to be around people who know how to do something, right?

It’s been very useful that way. I like the combination—that I can do what I want to do in my main studio. I think it’s also a very particular time in architecture. If you talk to the young generation, there are questions asked about where we’re going and what the issues are today. It seems like it’s an interesting moment, both in the professional and definitely in the academic community. You’ve talked to many people who are teaching—it seems like it’s global. They seem to be all asking questions, and they’re not quite sure where we are at this moment.

Again, that has to do with how the digital has filled the gap for 25 years, let’s say, and it radically expanded the formal options. We can produce things at a complexity level that was unheard of earlier, but it seems that we’ve now absorbed that, right? That particular territory has been exhausted. The young generation is now completely proficient at that level, and they’re now asking “Why?” and “What are the terms today?” Again, back to your conversations: environmental, urban, social, and cultural. It seems like we’re going back to much more basic questions again, right? Looking at architecture’s role in shaping the world we live in.

It’s going to be a more and more complex conversation as AI comes in. I’ve had several discussions with architects, and they’re looking at how it shapes the office. I remind them: “Wait a minute, the user doesn’t have to go to your office. They go to AI, right?” It eliminates the position. It’s going to be fascinating to see what takes place. I hope I live long enough.

Miljački  55:51

But before we’re wiped out by AI, what are you getting out of your current experiments in drawing with AI?

Mayne  56:00

I don’t think we’re going to get wiped out at all. To think it’s negative or positive—thinking in binary terms—is the wrong way. It exists and it will continue to. So now it is: how do we use it?

I don’t know if you know, but I’ve been using it quite a bit in writing. I’ve been more of a Claude person, and I’m finding it’s absolutely useful as a writing tool and a learning tool for young people. It’s amazing that you can work at the speed of light. And the drawing world is going to eliminate certain things—like a rendering today, which we’ve never been interested in. It’s for clients; it’s free. I’m looking at Julian shaking his head. It’s going to have a lot to do with the skill sets this next generation has, and it’s going to change it radically. And then in mechanical terms—because I think everybody’s talked about it—it’s going to affect medicine, law, engineering, the actual mechanical act of drawing and working things out. There’s no question.

Miljački  57:12

I have a couple of questions that maybe seem unrelated, but I think they’re both about acquiring work. We touched on both of these already, but I wanted to talk about the role that competitions have had in the office historically—and also, what is your experience with the Design Excellence Program or government as a client? Both of those seem to have resulted in important work for you.

Mayne  57:39

Absolutely huge. Huge. The competitions—which go back to when I’m still a very small studio doing small work. We’re being talked about as a “boutique” studio, and it’s connected to [Carlo] Scarpa and kind of “over-designed” and highly formal stuff.

But we’re working on urban competitions; we’re being invited to them, and they’re in Europe. There was Kristin Feireiss at the Aedes Gallery, and there was Vienna with the Längenfeldgasse, and we’re doing okay with them. We’re getting prizes, we’re getting recognized. And we’re winning a competition in LA for an arts project that doesn’t happen, but they’re all large-scale projects.

They were absolutely essential, both in reality and in the development of the studio, in that they took me in a certain direction. I just gave a little talk the other day about the Diamond Ranch High School, which is the project that kind of launched us into public work. When I walked into that room, I had already done all of these projects that led us into landscape. It wasn’t just that I was prepared conceptually for the project, but it gave me a certain confidence. I was very comfortable walking in the room because I’d worked on these ideas for ten years at a much larger scale, actually, in competition. It was huge—absolutely huge.

The GSA was—maybe it’s weird for me to say this—I can’t think of any architect for whom it was more valuable. Ed Feiner trusted me, and he trusted me when the world would have said I was… whatever they would have said. They wouldn’t have said I was a “trustworthy” person.

Miljački  59:22

Historically, this program [Design Excellence] has supported important US architects, so-

Mayne  59:27

Absolutely. It was absolutely enormous. And then we do a series of those projects, and then a lot of those ideas went to the OBO [Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations] and some of the same people. And now we’re given one of the larger—not the largest—embassies in the world, in Beirut. It was absolutely essential.

And for me, what’s also incredibly interesting about it is how a single person can affect architecture within a culture. Ed Feiner—one person. Did you ever have a chance to meet him? Or talk to him? Out of Cooper Union—this most eccentric character who had this incredible power over the program that gave so many architects opportunities to do serious work, right? And it’s a little moment in time in this country that won’t exist again for a while, for sure.

Miljački  1:00:19

Thank you for that. I have a couple more questions. Did you ever regret not taking a commission, or vice-versa?

Mayne  1:00:35

I’ve regretted taking certain work, but there are things I can’t talk about you. Don’t expect

Miljački  1:00:45

You know, a lot of the questions you’re asking… it could be like talking to a particular law firm. There’s a huge amount of discretionary stuff involved in architecture that doesn’t even allow you to talk about what would be extremely interesting. You could write, in some cases, a small little book on the relationship between client and architect.

Saarinen did it, actually. There’s a really nice piece that he did—it was published after he died—and he trashed Loos because he was a nasty character, right? I definitely had difficult clients. In this country, it’d be impossible to say you practice architecture and didn’t have difficult clients, because it’s not a group of people that are innately interested in architecture.

Mayne  1:00:50

You know, a lot of the questions you’re asking… it could be like talking to a particular law firm. There’s a huge amount of discretionary stuff involved in architecture that doesn’t even allow you to talk about what would be extremely interesting. You could write, in some cases, a small little book on [the relationship] between client and architect..

Miljački 1:01:45

Here is the opposite, sort of—maybe a more general question: Can we talk about the conditions in which Morphosis has done, or does, its best work? Or the conditions in which you would prefer to do your work? Are all commissions equally exciting, or are there ideal—or more ideal—circumstances?

Mayne  1:02:06

Okay, the work itself… some of it, you could say, would be more interesting based on the particular nature of the project. Although I have to say, I’ve always found it to be a Sophie’s Choice. I can never choose a project. A lot of people ask you, “What’s your best project?” or “What’s your most interesting project?”

But you invest. All of them have something to invest in, and they become interesting. And so for me, they all are kind of equally interesting. I get interested in the problem and then facilitate that problem. The client is a different story. That’s important—that you aren’t building serious work without serious clients. It doesn’t happen, or you’re hugely restrained from doing your most serious work. And that definitely is important. Your ability to negotiate, your social skills, etc.—or the client that is somehow engaged with you—is incredibly important for that equation.

Miljački  1:03:16

Here is the final question—or at least my final question; if you have more to add afterwards, you can. In talking about your office, but also academia, in different venues, you’ve made a distinction between architects and “thought leaders,” or suggested that we should be training thought leaders, not designers. I’m interested in probing that a little bit—or maybe posing a question that’s a little bit different: Is there a specific way that you think architecture schools need to transform to meet that challenge you’re identifying?

Mayne 1:03:54

I think, without a question at this point of my career—both professionally and as a teacher—there are a limited number of people that have a facility that deals with the formal aspect of architecture. Like any art form—if we’re discussing painting or sculpture or acting or whatever.

Writing, on the other hand… the education of an architect is very much based on critical thinking and operating within complex thinking. I think that the focus has to be on critical thinking, which is useful in any number of disciplines. And I think, again, the reality of being involved in education is that a huge amount of your students, in fact, will go into some other profession and utilize the nature of that thought process and that critical ability, right?

And the most talented formally don’t even have to go to school. If you’re Enrique Norten, if you’re Le Corbusier—you got kicked out. If you were Mies [van der Rohe], you didn’t go to school. On and on. And so I think for me, I’d go back—maybe implicit in your question is the over-emphasis on the formal. And this is coming from me: the “formal” is problematic. I would take it for granted, but I think the more important part is the broader critical thinking.

Especially, I’m looking at Julian again, for the current generation. I think the whole role of the architect would be where I’d want to start the conversation: What can we anticipate? What is our role in shaping this world around us? And how is that connected to the forces which are absolutely dominant in shaping it—that we have no control over?

That is one of the things that’s so interesting in urban design versus architecture: you’re responding to forces outside of your control, right? And you respond to those in the most intelligent ways possible. But it has nothing to do with the formal application. It has to do with the definition of the problem and how you participate and how you locate your role.

Young people need to be capable of finding the compelling issues of the time, and they need to have the alertness to observe that world. It moves us away from the formal, which is much more private and internal. I think one of the issues of architecture schools today is that they more and more have to look outside. They’re a bit private and secluded. In my generation, that worked well enough, because I could operate that way. I think the current generation is in another, completely different situation.

Miljački  1:07:05

Anything that you’d like to add to the record?

Mayne  1:07:10

You know, it’s really funny that all these things you ask me… I have kind of no need to answer any of these other than through the work. If you look at the work, everything I have to say is involved in that. I do my best to tell you how I got there, but I just show up every morning. I’m more like Stephen Curry: I’ve committed myself to something 24/7, and without a lot of self-consciousness, I just show up and speak and ask questions that make any sense at all.

I don’t try to be incredibly self-conscious of what’s going on; I just kind of do it. Because I produce a product, I have a manifestation of something. If I was a writer, I’d be the same way. If I was Paul Auster, I would just say, “Well, I kind of said it.” And oh, by the way, when you read it, it does seem to be loaded with chance behavior and eccentricity and fragment.

Recently I’ve been using—well, Claude—and I’ve been interested in how certain interests I’ve had are connected to my work. I connect Graham Greene and Faulkner and Auster and Calvino and Kundera and various people I’ve read. And oh, by the way, they’re all “concept characters.” They all are interested in fragment. They all have a certain notion of totality… and we could go through it, right? And it’s just absorbed. It doesn’t all have to be totally conscious. You just become a product of your surroundings.

Miljački 1:08:55

But this is why we are “downloading” these lessons—so that they can be a “surrounding” for others who listen.

Mayne  1:09:08

But then again, with the younger people listening to this… I have no idea. But there’s no question that Jimi Hendrix playing guitar backwards or being left-handed… you somehow absorb these things, and you’re not aware yourself of how they formed you. And so at some point, it’s this stuff… I’d be asking them: What are the things that are forming you right now? What are you interested in? What are you looking at? Because that’s absolutely going to be connected to your own creative activity.

Miljački 1:09:46

Thank you very much for talking to me today. And listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of I Would Prefer Not To, produced by myself and Julian Geltman.