The Thinking of Thom Mayne

Interesting lecture by architect Thom Mayne, at IAAC, Barcelona, yesterday. He talked about the “type of thinking” behind his works.

Through the lecture, he developed his point underlying certain “Non-Cartesian way of thinking” and also “thinking through things and not through words”. He illustrated his approach to thinking by celebrating things that are “always unique, never systematic”. In the case of the entrance to his extraordinary new building in China, the Giant Group Campus, the architect from Connecticut described it as “100% conceptual, completely useless, pure rhetorical”. Even, at a certain point, the 2005 Pritzker Prize resumed his whole life as a devotion to “not doing classical architecture”.

Ultimately, it sounded that Mayne, more than showing his way of thinking, showed the way he intensifies his beautiful forms by hiding the simple and extremely conventional way of thinking that lays behind his works. This slight contradiction, that does not devaluate a bit the immense quality of his work, is interesting for me, as I am working at the moment "How we think" by John Dewey in order to improve how we teach architecture. This contradiction just mentioned is assumed by Mayne himself: He emphasised that the “chassis” of his Cooper Union building in New York, was “incredibly simple”, and that this fact was completely hidden to the user through the concentration of the “encounters of different things” in its extremely sophisticated hall.

In the end, it seems that it is not “not putting the dot in the middle of the line” what warranties that Maine puts it in the proper place. It’s clear that it is his sculptural gift, which undoubtedly he has, what allows him to behave the way he does, not a especial way of thinking. But, wait a second… ¿Is not classical to hide simple structures under decoration?