Fate helped prof find his destiny

By Wendy Soderburg

Strange as it sounds, Thom Mayne describes his foray into architecture as "a fluke."

It hardly seems possible. Mayne — UCLA professor of architecture and urban design, founding board member of the prestigious Southern California Institute of Architecture, and founder of Santa Monica-based architectural firm Morphosis Architects — has won just about every architectural prize known to man, including the profession's highest international award, the Pritzker Prize.

Among his various high-profile projects with Morphosis are the state capitol building in Alaska; the Wayne L. Morse United States Courthouse in Eugene, Ore.; the Sun Tower commercial building in Seoul, Korea; the San Francisco Federal Building; the NYC 2012 Olympic Village; the Tsunami and Lutece restaurants in Las Vegas, Nev.; and the BMW Center in Munich, Germany.

And on April 22 in Schoenberg Hall, Mayne will deliver the 104th Faculty Research Lecture, an honor reserved for UCLA's most distinguished scholars.

But it was still a fluke, at least as Mayne remembers it.

"I was a problem child — just hell on wheels," he said of his years growing up with his mother, a gifted pianist who divorced his father when Mayne was very young. "I didn't understand what was going on, and I missed my father. It was a very bitter divorce."

Mayne admitted he spent most of his time in the principal's office. College was never even a blip on the radar until one day, on a lark, he entered an architectural competition at his high school. The mission was to design a house, and Mayne won.

"I thought, hey, this is fun. Maybe I should be an architect," he said. "But my counselor didn't even think I should go to college. She looked at my records and said, 'Oh, my God. You probably should go to some sort of penitentiary.' "

Undeterred, Mayne enrolled at USC's School of Architecture, where he received a bachelor's degree, and later at Harvard University's School of Design, where he earned his master's degree. He co-founded Morphosis in 1972 and joined UCLA's architecture faculty in 1993.

For the last four years, Mayne has directed the students in his "Design Studio" course to focus on urban projects, including a series of studies called "L.A. Now." This past quarter, however, he shifted his efforts to an initiative introduced by Brad Pitt that involves designing a prototype for low-cost housing in New Orleans.

"I'm interested in my teaching being in alignment with the university — to do research work and, in this case, to do outreach work and use the vast resources at UCLA," Mayne said. "UCLA has a breadth that's not possible at other institutions in terms of the types of projects you can tackle and the types of intellectual and creative capital that are available to you."

The UCLA community is invited to hear Mayne deliver the 104th Faculty Research Lecture, titled "Heritage Transformed," on April 22 at 3 p.m. in Schoenberg Hall, Schoenberg Music Building.