Thom Mayne
Kristin Feireiss, Esenija Bannan
Tchoban Foundation, 2020
Hardcover | 6-1/2 x 9 inches | 124 pages | German/English | ISBN: 9783944899152 | 24.00 €
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
The name Morphosis already describes the philosophy of the architectural practice: different elements are morphed together to form something new. With this idea in mind, Thom Mayne, its founding partner, has since its establishment in 1972 realised projects like the “Caltrans District 7 Headquarters” in Los Angeles, new academic building of the “41 Cooper Square” for The Cooper Union in New York, “Bill and Melinda Gates Hall” for Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and the “Hypo Alpe-Adria Center” in Klagenfurt, all of which are architectural icons. Mayne is also co-founder of the Southern California Institute of Architects (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles, and in that city his dedication to academia and research continues at the Now Institute. He received the Pritzker Prize in 2005 and served on President Barack Obama’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2016.
In the course of his outstanding career, Mayne has been challenging the nature of architectural drawing. This exhibition catalogue presents only a fraction of his tremendous and always idiosyncratic body of work: personal sketchbooks, serigraphs and hand and so-called sculptural drawings dating from 1979 to 2020. The book encompasses both “traditional” works on paper and two-and-a-half-dimensional drawings titled Drawdels – an invention combining drawing and model, plus 3D paintings, an experiment with form and materiality. This selection outlines how Thom Mayne’s interest in transformation and invention changed the formal vocabulary of modern architecture not only in Los Angeles but also abroad.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
Thom Mayne: SculpturalDrawings was scheduled to be on display at the Tchoban Foundation Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin from September 11 to November 15, 2020, but with COVID-19 impacting museums in Germany and other countries in Europe, the exhibition was most likely open for just a few of those dates. A friend of mine who lives in Berlin saw the show, and I'm grateful that he snagged me a copy of the catalog accompanying the presentation of Mayne's drawings, collages, relief models, and sculptures. Mayne and his firm, Morphosis, were a huge influence on me in architectural school, and I think they are perfect for an exhibition at a museum of architectural drawing, having produced highly influential drawings and collages for architectural competitions and other commissions in the 1980s and early-1990s. Twelve years ago I blogged about Mayne's output, populating a lightbox on the then-new website Morphopedia (now defunct, its contents since rolled into the Morphosis website) with images from the Artspark, Chiba Golf Club, Crawford Residence, and other projects.
The exhibition and catalog are split fairly evenly between projects from those two decades — including the two mentioned above but also the Lawrence Residence, Sixth Street (second spread, below), and Berlin Wall, among others — and so-called "Composites" and "Sculptural Reliefs" (third spread) produced after the firm's digital turn in the late-1990s. The latter have a certain beauty to them, but personal circumstances dictate that I'm still drawn to the earlier work. Unfortunately, the fairly small format of the book and the noticeably wide margins on the pages combine to create a desire for larger images. To take one instance, the famous mixed-media composition for the Berlin Wall project from 1988 (the same image that's on the cover) is just roughly 3x6" on the page, considerably smaller than the 40x80" original. For those who want Morphosis projects from the same era on larger pages, and with full-bleed images too, I recommend Connected Isolation, the AD monograph from 1993.
Speaking of the Berlin Wall project, SculpturalDrawings features an interview between Mayne and Kristin Feireiss (first spread), who curated the exhibition that project was made for: Berlin — Denkmal oder Denkmodell? (Berlin — Monument or Thieoretical Model?) at Staatliche Kunsthalle Berlin. Feireiss is curator at Aedes Architecture Forum, the gallery she co-founded in 1980, and which happens to be located directly across the street from the Tchoban Foundation. The interview, as well as essays by Stefano Casciani and Esenija Bannan, give good background on the history and evolution of Mayne and Morphosis, but I would have loved more words on the techniques employed in making the drawings, collages, "drawdels" (3d drawings, best employed in the Crawford Residence), even the composites and sculptural reliefs, whose generic "mixed media" descriptors beg more questions than answers. As such, this book is definitely for die-hard fans of Mayne and Morphosis, like myself, and for the few people who managed to see the exhibition in person last year.
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