Thom Mayne

Mayne was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1944, studied architecture at USC and helped found the Southern California Institute of Architecture in 1972, the same year he started Morphosis with a rotating group of USC collaborators. For two decades the practice built mostly houses and small institutional work in Los Angeles, developing a vocabulary of tilted planes, exposed structure and machined metal before computer modelling let it build at the scale of the Caltrans headquarters and the San Francisco Federal Building. Mayne has always described the work as diagnostic rather than decorative, treating a facade's moving parts and irregular geometry as responses to light, seismic bracing or programme rather than as style for its own sake. He has taught at SCI-Arc since its founding and received the Pritzker Prize in 2005 and the AIA Gold Medal in 2013.