INTERVIEW: THOM MAYNE
Mayne unveiled his designs for the 381m-tall 7132 tower
IMAGE: MORPHOSIS ARCHITECTS
in Vals in 2015
The Pritzker-winning founder of Morphosis is known for his bold approach to architecture. He tells Kim Megson about compellingness, criticism and why he’s building a skyscraper hotel next to Switzerland’s most famous thermal spa
CLAD mag 2017 ISSUE 3
T
he profession of architecture is so filled with grey personalities and corporate equivocators,” the late architect Lebbeus Woods once wrote, “that when an architect comes along who is uncompromising and determined to make the architecture he wants, he inspires both love and hate, not to mention resentment and envy.” Woods was referring to his friend and colleague Thom Mayne, who had just been awarded the 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize. In an essay penned to celebrate the accolade, Woods argued that Mayne was a designer “who confronts the typical with the innovative, and the familiar with the strange.” These attributes, he argued, along with Mayne’s desire to eschew traditional forms in favour of something more unconventional, had given his
friend the reputation of a rebel and a maverick – something reinforced by a “popular press drawn to anything racy and even slightly scandalous”. Twelve years on, Mayne and his studio Morphosis are still producing distinctive work and generating hyperbolic headlines. And no project has proved more controversial than his design, unveiled in 2015, to build Europe’s tallest skyscraper in a serene Swiss valley.
In hot water The picturesque village of Vals is famous for its thermal springs and Peter Zumthor’s iconic Therme Vals spa resort; the project which propelled him to international fame and transformed the small hamlet into an architectural mecca. In 2012, sixteen years after the resort opened, the municipality sold the baths and hotel to local
CLADGLOBAL.COM 113