Morphosis (1998-2004)

This fourth entry in Rizzoli's Morphosis series
presents the recent work of Thom Mayne's
multifaceted firm, which has now reached the
pinnacle of international recognition.
One of the few truly visionary architects of largescale
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.
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.
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