Thom Mayne is founding principal of Morphosis, a global design firm engaged in architecture, urban planning, and research since 1972. Based in Los Angeles, New York, and Shanghai with projects world-wide, Morphosis’ work represents a wide variety of scales and typologies, from civic projects, schools, and museums to commercial towers and city planning. Some of his major projects include the Caltrans Building in Los Angeles, 41 Cooper Square in New York, Bill & Melinda Gates Hall at Cornell, Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Federal Office Building in San Francisco, Wayne L. Morse Courthouse in Eugene, Hypo Alpe-Adria Center in Austria, Sun Tower in Seoul, and Hanking Center Tower in Shenzhen. Morphosis has been the recipient of 25 Progressive Architecture Awards, over 100 AIA Awards and 23 monographs published by Rizzoli, El Croquis, GA, Phaidon and Equal Books. Morphosis has been exhibited widely, including a large solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2006, the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, the Walker Arts Institute in Minneapolis, and a major retrospective at the Netherlands Architectural Institute in 1999.
Mayne is a Distinguished Professor at UCLA, where he has taught since 1993. He has also taught at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Penn, the Bartlett and the Berlage Institute, and is one of five faculty who founded SCI-Arc in 1972. His distinguished honors include the AIA Gold Medal in 2013, American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2010, President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 2009, Centennial Medal from the American Academy in Rome in 2009, McDowell Medal in 2008, National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt Museum in 2006, Pritzker Prize in 2005, and Rome Prize in 1987. He also holds an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the California College of Art and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Mayne's lecture, "The Vastness of Interconnectedess," is free and open to the public.
Pictured: Bill and Melinda Gates Hall, Cornell University, photo by Kenneth Zirkel.