30 January 2006, 5:30 p.m.
Salone Brunelleschi, Istituto degli Innocenti,
Piazza Santissima Annunziata, Florence
After Norman Foster, Yona Friedman, Bernard Tschumi, and Peter Eisenman, the protagonist of our latest appointment with the greats of contemporary architecture will be Thom Mayne. He is the subject of the first lecture of Targetti’s Osservatorio sull’Architettura’s 2006 season, which with the critical contribution of Pino Brugellis and Lara-Vinca Masini will explore the complex world of his extraordinary architectural language.
An exceptional personality, head of the most innovative and irreverent architecture studio on the international panorama, the American Thom Mayne (Morphosis) was the winner of the 2005 edition of the Pritzker Prize, the world’s most authoritative award for architecture.
Defined by criticism as a product of the turbulent Sixties who transformed an ardent and rebellious desire for change into reality, the US architect is undoubtedly the most radical and nonconformist exponent of contemporary architecture.
Educated in the culture of contestation and counter-project, over the years he has renewed his identity, rising to the apex of the international star system without losing anything of the explosive force that has characterized his work from his earliest projects onward. His passage from “architecture’s bad boy” to acclaimed representative of the establishment, acknowledged by that middle-class public that he often strongly criticized just a few years earlier, is crowned by the prestigious Pritzker Prize, Mayne’s retaliation for all the years spent safeguarding the purity of his unorthodox ideas. He has said that after having been defined an outsider for all his life but not legitimized in that role, all of a sudden he is receiving honors for exactly that reason.
Morphosis’ are perturbing works of architecture, harmonic dissonances full of energy and spatial tensions, shards of reinforced concrete, steel, and glass capable of creating original architecture representative of the uniqueness and rootlessness of California culture, architecture that does not show the influence either of European or Japanese Modernism or the US architectural tradition.
His work is characterized by an intuitive, reflexive approach that attempts to add “yet another strain to [that conversation] some may hear as the cacophony of modern life”: works of architecture that represent the complexity of contradiction, of conflict, of change, and of dynamism obtained through rigorous process but yet capable of leaving openings for the unpredictable. Work perceived as the music of reality, which through the stratification of new tones adds exquisite complexity.
For this reason, his architecture is not marked by deconstruction but rather by the complexity of contradiction, thanks to which Mayne creates an architectural language with a particularly rich syntax that reveals the multiplicities and discrepancies that distinguish the contemporary. His language, free from the constrictions of the Classical ideal - made of formal constraints that are no longer a part of our life - applies precise method to investigation of the instinctive and obscure side of reality. Thus, his architecture shatters unity, balance, and the hierarchy of Classical composition to create an unstable geometry with disarticulated and de-composed forms: “estrangement” and “displacement” emphasized by “extreme” use of materials that annul the opposition of internal and external and subvert the very concept of space. The walls incline, crack, open; the very idea of closure is destabilized and disintegrated. Space becomes a perturbation of traditional statics and tectonics, a crisis state for the notion of vertical and horizontal. Works of architecture with dynamic volumes, with an “unfinished” look, become fragments of landscape that shuns anonymity and neutrality, absorbing local idioms and syntax; the architectural language begins to layer “with meaning that is connected to the city’s place and time and provides an armature for development.”
