Thom Mayne se lleva el Pritzker 2005!

Thom Mayne, principal del despacho de arquitectura californiano Morphosis, el enfant terrible del mundillo arquitectónico-académico de la costa oeste americana y co-fundador de la Sci-Arc, del que ya se habló por aquí una vez, es el nuevo Premio Pritzker 2005, y sucede así a Zaha Hadid que lo ganó en el 2004...

Felicidades Thom!



Via web oficial del Pritzker Prize

Via New York Times:

Architect Mayne Wins Pritzker Prize
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: March 20, 2005

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) -- Thomas Mayne, the bad boy of architecture for years before reaping international acclaim in his mid-50s, was named Sunday as the winner of the Pritzker Prize, the field's most prestigious honor.

Mayne, 61, is the first American to win the Pritzker in 14 years and only the eighth U.S. architect to win in the 27-year history of the contest.

The jury cited Mayne for creating a bold architectural style that reflects the ``unique, somewhat rootless, culture of Southern California'' through angular lines and an unfinished, open-ended feel.

``Thom Mayne is a product of the turbulent '60s who has carried that rebellious attitude and fervent desire for change into his practice, the fruits of which are only now becoming visible,'' the jury wrote.

For Mayne, winning the Pritzker is vindication for the years he spent struggling to maintain the purity of his unorthodox ideas. His stand earned him a reputation as an angry young man and alienated many clients.

``My whole essence was attempting to do something I believed in. I didn't understand how to negotiate that notion of the private and the public world,'' he said in an interview at Morphosis, his Santa Monica studio. ``Your whole life you're told you're an outsider and you can't do that, and then you're honored for it.''

Mayne will be awarded a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion on May 31 during a ceremony at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago's Millennium Park. Past winners of the Pritzker Prize, sponsored by the family that developed the Hyatt Hotel chain, include I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano and Rem Koolhaas.

Fired from a teaching job at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, Mayne founded an alternative architecture school called SCI-Arc in 1972 with six colleagues and 40 students. That year, he started Morphosis and two years later won his first award for designing a Pasadena school attended by his son.

For two decades, Mayne worked in relative obscurity on local houses, restaurants and office buildings and a handful of overseas projects. Then, in the mid-1990s, a series of convention-bending designs won Mayne his first major international praise.

He has since won competitions and commissions for an array of major public projects, including the new Alaska state capitol, a new academic building for The Cooper Union in New York, and New York's 2012 Olympic Village, which will be built even if the city doesn't get the games for that year.

Today, Mayne projects little of the 1960s rebel that marked the early days of his turbulent career. He keeps his salt-and-pepper hair military-short and pads around his sparsely furnished studio in a sport coat and brown, wool slacks, cradling a Starbucks coffee and wielding a notepad full of scribbles.

His office, an unassuming building in a quiet neighborhood, is cluttered with spent ideas. Old models gather dust on window ledges, tables and even the bathroom floor below yellowing newspaper clips and articles about urban renewal.

Clearly, while Mayne has learned to temper his stubborn idealism, it is far from gone.

He talks about buildings as agents of social change, as the vital ``connective tissue of the city'' that can change how people live and behave. And even in his best projects, he says he has never managed to achieve more than 75 percent of what he initially envisions -- in part because of compromise with clients.

``I can't imagine any serious architect saying he's not restricted. I'm always restricted, it's just a matter of degree,'' he said. ``It's inevitable.''

Mayne considers Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, completed in 2000, as the turning point of his career. It was one of his first large-scale U.S. commissions and with it, critics began to cheer his idealism instead of bash it.

``It shouldn't have been built. It was practically impossible, and we proved it wasn't impossible -- that was the fun part,'' said Mayne, who won a design contest to build the school.

The cluster of angular glass-and-metal buildings jut from the campus like spaceships in a design that he says attempts to resolve the tension inherent in modern life in ``mathematical, geometric terms.''

The same sharp, unfinished feeling can be found in other Mayne creations, reflecting his obsession with the tension of living in a diverse, migratory society. Wings protrude at odd angles, lines and forms collide and blend, whole buildings are slanted and off-kilter.

``If there's a singular broad topic to being a human being today, it's that you somehow have to manage these radical non sequiters, these conflicting desires,'' he said. ``It represents a dialogue that's attempting to bring those forces together to some singularity, but it denies completion. The building belongs to the site, but it's also homeless. It's migratory.''