An American Captures
Top Architecture Prize

Thom Mayne won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the first American in 14 years to be picked for what many consider the profession's most important international award.

As founder of the Los Angeles-firm Morphosis (www.morphosis.net), Mr. Mayne is known for weaving unusual shapes and cutting-edge ideas into public and government buildings. His most famous works include the futuristic and playful Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, Calif., and the recently completed California Department of Transportation District 7 Headquarters in Los Angeles, whose outer skin opens and closes in reaction to temperature and sunlight.

Mr. Mayne, 61 years old, born in Connecticut and raised in Whittier, Calif., spent the early part of his career designing small experimental projects. After a prolonged period of inactivity, he re-emerged in the mid-1990s, winning a series of large public commissions.

His buildings, often clad in sheets of textured metal and concrete, are described as having the quality of being unfinished and in motion. "Thom Mayne sees architecture as a contact sport -- a group activity that pushes physical limits," says Karen Stein, a Pritzker jury member and editorial director at Phaidon Press, which published a retrospective book of Mr. Mayne's work in 2003.

Mr. Mayne has designed three buildings currently under construction for the federal government, which together cost more than $275 million. They include an office tower in San Francisco, a federal courthouse in Eugene, Ore., and a satellite-communications facility for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration in Suitland, Md.

In February he won a competition to design the Alaska state capitol in Juneau, though the state legislature hasn't approved the project. Outside the U.S. he is designing a public-housing estate in Spain and a pharmaceutical-company complex in Shanghai.

A frequent client, Edward A. Feiner, former chief architect for the General Services Administration, says Mr. Mayne is "innovative" and can "execute a project that is a work of architecture and art and yet is responsible to the client's parameters," and "within a budget."

Despite the government work, Mr. Mayne is reluctant to take the mantle as an "American" architect. He says his work goes "against the grain" of what he sees as the current mood of the country. "This is not a time when our people see our government in optimistic terms or contributing to solving problems."

The Pritzker family, owners of the Hyatt Hotel chain, established the prize in 1979 to honor achievement in architecture, in part because the discipline isn't recognized by the Nobel Prize. Previous winners include Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei and Frank O. Gehry, who served as a juror for this year's award. Ada Louise Huxtable, an architecture critic whose work regularly appears in The Wall Street Journal, also was on the panel, which judges in secret. Last year's winner, Zaha Hadid, was the first woman to receive the award.

This year's prize, the 27th, will be presented in Chicago's Millennium Park on May 31. Mr. Mayne will receive $100,000 and a bronze medallion.

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