The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected Thom Mayne, FAIA, as the recipient of 2013 AIA Gold Medal. Mayne will be honored at a special event in March in Washington, D.C. as well as at the 2013 AIA National Convention in Denver.
The AIA Gold Medal, voted on annually, is considered to be the profession's highest honor that an individual can receive. The Gold Medal honors an individual whose significant body of work has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture.
Mayne's commitment to architecture as a journey and not as a destination is evidenced through the forms and materials of his buildings, his personal and professional life, and the name of his firm, Morphosis, which was founded in Los Angeles in 1972. In his own life, he's evolved from a rugged iconoclast to a collaborative government works mainstay.
In the same year he formed Morphosis, Mayne and several colleagues founded the Southern California Institute of Architects, or SCI-Arc. Since then, Mayne has had a long record of academic involvement, which has helped to spread his enthusiasm for experimentally pushing architecture's role in society further into the cultural forefront among decades of students.
An unexpected champion of the federal government's General Service Administration's (GSA) Design Excellence program, Mayne's palette of bold, angular forms, exposed structural elements, and double-skin veils that play on notions of dynamic transparency have become trendsetting motifs in a growing number of governmental and institutional projects.
"He is one of the few architects able to head a large-scale, successful practice while influentially designing theoretical premises," wrote former AIA Gold Medal Winner Antoine Predock, FAIA, in a letter of recommendation. "The result has been a 40-year body of work that is intellectually rigorous and consistently searching."
Mayne is the 69th AIA Gold Medalist. Past recipients of the AIA Gold Medal include: Thomas Jefferson (1993), Frank Lloyd Wright (1949), Louis Sullivan (1944), LeCorbusier (1961), Louis Kahn (1971), I.M. Pei (1979), Santiago Calatrava (2005), Renzo Piano (2008), Peter Bohlin (2010), Fumihiko Maki (2011) and Steven Holl (2012). In recognition of his legacy to architecture, his name will be chiseled into the granite Wall of Honor in the lobby of the AIA National component in Washington, D.C.