Product Description

One of the few truly visionary architects of large-scale commissions working today, Thom Mayne won the 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize, his field's most prestigious award. Mayne's influential firm Morphosis, founded in the early 1970s, has maintained an avant-garde presence among contemporary architecture firms even as it has garnered high-profile, big-budget commissions around the world. Since Rizzoli published Volume I of the Morphosis series in 1989, the Los Angeles-based firm has attained the highest levels of international esteem and influence as it continues to push its intricate modernism into new territory. In the tradition of its three comprehensive and visually groundbreaking predecessors, this fourth volume packs 575 illustrations into its tour of Morphosis's activity at the turn of the twenty-first century. And like other series of Rizzoli monographs, the Morphosis series is considered the authoritative record of the firm's work. New works covered in Volume IV include the extraordinary Cal Trans Headquarters in Los Angeles, housing designed for New York's 2012 Olympics bid, the San Francisco Federal Office Building, the NOOA Satellite Operations Facility, and major housing projects in Toronto and Shanghai constructed of glass and high-tech materials demonstrating the appealingly iconoclastic modernism of Thom Mayne and Morphosis.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #577514 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-02
• Released on: 2006-05-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

About the Author
Thom Mayne is also a professor of architecture at UCLA, and one of the founders of the avant-garde institution SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) in downtown Los Angeles.

Customer Reviews

A Good Buy

this was a good all around book. Morphosis and Thom Mayne's style of architecture is something every person serious about the study of recent developments in modern architecture should have in their collection, no matter how much you buy his theory and approach. The book is very well done, the content level is definitely worth the purchase. Far too many architecture books these days are nothing more than pictures, this book definetely provides one the best balancing acts I've seen thus far.

Complex but Decipherable
This is more a review of the books about Morphosis than the works of Morphosis. The first monograph is still essential to my library, and is highly accessible and analytical. Unfortunately, the second monograph was almost incomprehensible. I mean, I literally couldn't make out what I was looking at. The third major monograph from Rizzoli was better in this regard, but of course that snapshot of the from at that time showed a lot of promise but little built work -- yet. So this monograph comes along and a whole lot has happened for Morphosis in the meantime. While the graphics are complex still, often overlapping and vignetted, I can make sense of them. Also, it's just great, really an inspiration to not only see work built, but to see it executed so well.

I would always like to see more detail drawings in these monographs, but with a few exceptions, I've just learned to live without them. It's my one criticism of this book really. The analysis is less, um, didactic than the first monograph, but you do get a certain joy out of figuring some things out for yourself. In the end, while the forms of Morphosis are complex and the high-lines-per-square-inch drawings add to that, ultimately, the process, idea and problems are apparent in the work itself. It's cleverly presented and clear in idea if not simple in execution.

Great Book
This is truly a must have in any architecutal book collection. 400+ color pages, showing recent projects. I have found this book a great reasource for my studies.