Product Description
This monograph documents all of the built work by Morphosis, a Los Angeles-based firm headed by Thom Mayne and one of the most influential American architecture firms in practice since the 1980s. The firm's non-Cartesian forms; beautifully executed, sculptural models; and complex, computer-generated drawings helped to usher in a new era of architectural experimentation in the early 1980s that was also embraced by upcoming firms such as Eric Owen Moss, Rem Koolhaas and Coop Himmelblau. Mayne himself became a highly desirable teacher, critic and lecturer and continues to lecture and participate in conferences and competitions in Europe, South America, Israel and Asia. Unlike previous volumes on Morphosis, which almost exclusively focus on drawings and model photographs, this book is comprised of bold, documentary-style colour photographs of completed buildings, 35 in total, with carefully chosen plans and drawings added to punctuate the photos. This book publishes for the first time extensive photographs of all of Morphosis's completed work, from the early residential and restaurant projects in Los Angeles to the most recent work beyond California and the United States - in Canada, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Austria. Included are the Cedars Sinai Comprehensive Cancer Center; a showroom for Vecta in Los Angeles; later residential projects - the Lawrence, Crawford, and Blades houses; exhibits at the Walker Art Center and Netherlands Architecture Institute; the Hypo Alpe-Adria-Centre in Klagenfurt, Austria; and Toronto Graduate Student Housing in Toronto, Canada. The work in this volume is presented in a clean, almost cinematic layout, with large-format colour photographs, including many double-page spreads, illustrating the individual projects. The projects are organized in reverse chronological order; project sections are followed by an essay by Thom Mayne interspersed with commentary by Val Warke.
About the Author
Thom Mayne founded Morphosis in 1972 in partnership with Michael Rotondi (Rotondi left Morphosis to start his own firm in the late 1980s). That same year, Mayne collaborated with other architects to found the Southern California Institute of Architecture, or SCI-Arc. With Morphosis, Thom Mayne has been the recipient of 20 Progressive Architecture Awards, 39 American Institute of Architects Awards, and numerous other design recognitions. Currently he holds a faculty position at UCLA School of Arts and Architecture. Over the past 20 years, his academic activities have included teaching positions at Columbia University, Harvard University (Elliot Noyes Chair, 1998), Yale (Eliel Saarinen Chair, 1991), the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands and the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, as well as various universities throughout the world. Val Warke is an associate professor of architecture at Cornell University.