Cooper-Hewitt Announces 14th Annual National Design Awards Winners
Studio Gang Architects won in the architecture category. This is their design for a Lincoln Park Zoo pavilion in Chicago. (Steve Hall / Courtesy Cooper-Hewitt)
Acting director Caroline Baumann of The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum has announced the winners of the 2013 National Design Awards. The 14th annual Awards program continues the practice of acknowledging excellence and innovation across an array of disciplines. This year’s winners will be recognized during a gala dinner on Thursday, October 17 at New York’s Pier 60 in conjunction with National Design Week, where they will be presented with trophies created by The Corning Museum of Glass.
Let The Archi-Sparks Fly: Thom Mayne Fights Back Against Bad Reviews
Thom Mayne’s Perot Museum in Dallas. (Iwan Baan)
Ladies and gentlemen, we finally have a blood feud in Los Angeles. It seems that Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne doesn’t care for Thom Mayne’s work. At all. Reviewing his new Perot Museum in Dallas, he called the building, “One of the pricey, preening old breed.” Adding, “it is a thoroughly cynical piece of work, a building that uses a frenzy of architectural forms to endorse the idea that architecture, in the end, is mere decoration.”
Hawthorne has used this vitriol on other Mayne buildings, like the Caltrans building and the Cahill Center at Caltech, which, he said, employs a “skin-and-stair strategy that allows the client to make the rest of the building—every interior office or gallery—conventional at best and banal at worst.”
Mayne, not surprisingly, doesn’t appear happy. In a recent public tour of his new offices in Culver City, led by our friend and design journalist Alissa Walker, Mayne said he would not be allowing a local architecture critic to write about his new building for his firm’s offices—he was asking a science writer to do the story instead. “All local writers are horrible,” he said. “There are no good writers in Los Angeles.” We beg to differ!
Leading West Coast Architects Celebrate DnA’s Relaunch in Santa Monica
Eventgoers outside the Tesla Store in Santa Monica. (Micah Cordy)
On Monday, members of LA’s design and architecture cognoscenti descended on the Tesla store on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade to celebrate the official relaunch of KCRW’s DnA (Design and Architecture). The event featured a discussion between DnA host and executive producer Frances Anderton and Elon Musk, the visionary founder-CEO of Tesla and Space X. Those present included Michael Rotondi, Ray Kappe, Thom Mayne, developer Tom Gilmore, and Getty architecture curators Wim de Wit and Christopher Alexander.
Mayne Takes Gold, Williams Tsien Take Firm Award
Caltrans District 7 Headquarters (Morphosis)
Add another medal to Thom Mayne‘s trophy case. Thursday the American Institute of Architects announced that it was awarding him the 2013 AIA Gold Medal. He’ll pick it up at next year’s AIA convention in Denver, becoming the 69th AIA Gold Medalist. The list of works from his firm Morphosis is way too long to include here, but it includes the diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, California; the California Department of Transportation District 7 Headquarters in Los Angeles; and 41 Cooper Square in New York City.
Meanwhile Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects have been awarded the AIA Firm Award. The architects, who opened the new Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia this year, have also designed (among other heralded work) the former American Folk Art Museum in New York; the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley; and the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center.
Barnes Foundation (Tod Williams Billie Tsien)
Cornell Chooses Thom Mayne; SOM Forges Ahead with Master Plan
Cornell has made an object-ive choice in Thom Mayne. (Brnandon Thomas / Flickr)
Cornell University has named 2005 Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne as architect for the first building at its Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island called the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute. The selection should overshadow some sour grapes that were emanating from Stanford in the past few days regarding their losing bid. Mayne bested an all-star list, including Rem Koolhaas of OMA, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, Steven Holl, and SOM. The choice of Mayne, whose iconic building 41 Cooper Square still jams traffic at Astor Place, hints that Cornell is looking for a traffic stopper of its own on the East River.
Inside the Archtober Building of the Day #20: 41 Cooper Square
41 Cooper Square by Thom Mayne. (Brandon Thomas / Flickr)
Building of the Day #20: 41 Cooper Square
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
New York, NY
Often “stats” and awards are known well before the public appreciates a new building’s urban role. Cooper Union’s 41 Cooper Square, designed by Thom Mayne, FAIA, of Morphosis Architects with Gruzen Samton as Associate Architect, is more than a volume for a multi-disciplinary academic building with a co-generation plant, cooling and heating ceiling panels, low V.O.C. materials, green terraces, and “Fit-City”-worthy vertical circulation. While these stats did help the client claim the first LEED Platinum-certified academic laboratory building, Cooper has also revived a former traffic triangle and extended its identity southwards along the new Bowery. At a time when both NYU and Columbia’s building goals face sharp scrutiny, it pays to have a tough skin. Make that a gritty double skin!
Crunch Time for Morphosis Offices
Morphosis HQ construction site last Thursday.
We know Thom Mayne and Morphosis are moving. Now we know they’re moving REALLY soon. Their new headquarters, located just next to the new Expo Line tracks in Culver City, started construction last summer and are wrapping up this month. They need to move in by July 1, said Mayne, because the lease to their rented warehouse space next door is up. That should get things moving, despite some delays because of this year’s heavy rains.
Video> Mayne Gets Artsy & Art-itecture Round Up
Thom Mayne explains his art (still from Form video)
LA starchitect Thom Mayne recently took some time to share his art/sculpture with our friends at Form magazine. The three-dimensional pieces reveal his love for investigating hard-edged metallic shards, architectural movement, faceted surfaces, hovering forms and general chaos; all major forces in his architecture.
Watch Thom Mayne discuss his art and see more art by architects after the click.
Gehry Goes Back To School
After years in the spotlight it appears that University of Southern California (USC) uber-alum Frank Gehry has decided it’s time to give back. The school announced today that Gehry has been named the school’s Judge Widney Professor of Architecture. He’s also taught at Columbia and Yale, but this is his first time teaching at his Alma Mater.
It’s not clear yet what classes he’s going to lead. Gehry, 81, graduated from USC (B.Arch) back in 1954. He’s arguably the school’s most famous alumnus, but there is good competition, including architects Thom Mayne and Gregory Ain, astronaut Neil Armstrong, filmmaker George Lucas, and, of course, O.J. Simpson.
Mayne Opens Up About Eli Broad
The Daily Beast features a very interesting article about LA’s “Culture King” Eli Broad. The writer, LA Weekly’s Tom Christie, details Broad’s incredible spending spree on culture (not to mention on education and science), from the Broad Stage in Santa Monica to his new museum downtown, putting him in the company of other legendary—and, um, challenging— LA philanthropists like Norton Simon and J. Paul Getty. While art world figures like Michael Govan take their shots, few architects appear willing to talk on record about the intrusive client (Broad calls himself “strong willed” in the story). But one of them is Thom Mayne, who doesn’t pull many punches, although in the end seems to have an affinity for Broad. As for their failed partnership on the downtown museum, Mayne gets in a little dig: “We worked for a while, and we just reached a mutual understanding that we weren’t going to work together… It’s my city, and I didn’t want to produce a building I wasn’t proud of.”. Another revealing tidbit “I think he’s crazy as a loon half the time, and I don’t agree with him. But I have great admiration for him, and I actually like him.” For his part Broad gets in a slap at those who criticize his style: “Why don’t they join in the L.A. cultural life, rather than [sit] back and [offer] commentary?”
The A+D House Party
There was quite a crowd gathered at the new A+D Museum last night. CLICK TO LAUNCH SLIDESHOW
As promised yesterday, we are going paparazzi. We have pix of the architecture event of the week: the opening of LA’s A+D Museum. (See Slideshow Here). The event drew hundreds into the museum’s brand new space, a beautiful white jewel box located on the ground floor of a midcentury office building. Guests were treated to tunes from KCRW DJ Tom Schnabel, and bid on works of art and sculpture created by some of LA’s biggest architects and cultural icons. Big names contributing work included Bruce Mau, Max Neutra, Lorcan O’Herlihy, Thom Mayne, Richard Meier, Hitoshi Abe, and many more. And so it begins for a museum that has for years been known for not having its own space. Welcome home.
Mayne Street
We're as surprised as he is.
Granted he’s won the Pritzker Prize and had a string of recent successes, but all the same we were more than surprised to get a forwarded White House press release from Morphosis today touting the appointment of Thom Mayne, one of the industry’s gruffer individuals, to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. He is the only practicing architect on the list. Created in 1982, the committee, according to its website, brings, well, the arts and humanities into the White House. Headed by the First Lady, activities under the previous administration included an “unprecedented” cultural exchange with China, a “bi-national cultural communique” with Mexico, and the creation of the Coming Up Taller awards to honor school-age artists. Read More
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