Morphosis

The Morphosis studio was founded by Thom Mayne and Michele Rotondi in Santa Monica, California, in 1975. Since 1975 the practice has been run by Mayne alone. Thom Mayne was borne in Connecticut in 1944. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Southern California in 1968 and his Master of Architecture from Harvard University in 1978. He was a founder of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (sci-Arc) and has held teaching positions at Columbia, Harvard (Elliot Noyes chair, 1998) and Yale Universities (Eliel Saarinen chair, 1991), the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands and the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Currently, he holds a tenured faculty position at the ucla School of Arts and Architecture in Los Angeles. Honors received include the Prize Fellowship from the American Academy of Design in Rome (1987), elect member from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1992), the Gold Medal of aia in Los Angeles (2000). With Morphosis, Mayne has won numerous architectural prizes, including 20 Progressive Architecture Awards and 43 aia Awards. Under his guidance, the firm has partecipated in individual and collective exhibitions in many countries around the world. Of particular note were those at the Contemporary Art Centre in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis, the Ministerio de Formento in Madrid, 1998, the great retrospective organized in 1999 at the Netherlands Architectural Institute (nai) and the last International Biennale of Architecture in Venice, 2002. Buildings and projects by Morphosis have been published in the leading international specialist press and in 21 monographic volumes, the most recent published by Phaidon in 2002.

Morphosis