Caltrans District 7 Headquarters

Mayne and his Morphosis studio treated the commission — a headquarters for the state agency that builds California's freeways — as an argument that a government office block need not be inert. Thirteen floors of steel frame sit behind a skin of perforated aluminum screens hung clear of the glass wall beneath, shading the offices without sealing them, and the screens themselves fold and cantilever rather than running flat. The north face, which has no windows, carries Motordom, a four-storey field of programmable lights the artist Keith Sonnier designed with the building; a glass-floored conference room on the third storey looks straight down onto the public plaza. None of this was cheap restraint: the building cost $165 million against a program of ordinary state offices, and it opened to as much argument as admiration. Two years later the Pritzker jury gave Mayne the prize on the strength of it, the first American to receive it in more than a decade.