Morphosis: Buildings and Projects

Winners of numerous awards and the subject of exhibitions from Tokyo to Berlin, Los Angeles to New York, Morphosis architects Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi are leaders in the avant-garde movement of the new architecture of California. Through their association with SciArc (Southern California Institute for Architecture), of which Mayne was a founding member and where Rotondi is the present Director, they have also been a leading force for the younger generation of California architects.

The works of Morphosis have encompassed a wide range of building types, including the single-family house and multiple-unit housing, medical facilities and offices, restaurants and retail spaces. In all projects, a hallmark of their work is always a clean, crisp coolness expressing their almost uncanny ability to turn the most ordinary materials into surfaces and details of astonishing power and grace. The effect of this activity is intensified through structural ambiguity and shifting harmonies, in an architecture of economy and of extraordinary sophistication.

One of the unique features of the methods of design of Morphosis Architects is the way in which they use models and drawings. Unlike most architects, after a building is completed Mayne and Rotondi go back to the drawings and models, reworking and analyzing them as sources of inspiration and generation for new designs. It is through this activity of creating and re-creating that the name Morphosis is derived.

Peter Cook, a founding member of Archigram, is a professor of architecture and Head of the Architecture Department of the Stadelschule in Frankfurt. He is a principal in the firm of Cook and Hawley Architects in London.

George Rand is a clinical psychologist practicing in Los Angeles, as well as associate professor of architecture at UCLA, where he teaches and conducts research on architectural programming, the phase of architecture concerned with human response to the physical environment.