Iwan Baan

The University of Calgary faculty of environmental design is launching a new lecture series with a bang, bringing in one of architecture’s major players, Pritzker Architecture Prize-winner Thom Mayne.

The Pritzker Prize is basically the Nobel Prize for architecture. If you’ve won it, you don’t need to explain yourself to anybody.

Mayne’s work is eclectic and sometime controversial, including winding towers, transparent schools and a public building in San Francisco that many detractors refer to as the Death Star. His aim is to blur the lines between the skin of a building and the frame, to mingle the private interior and the public exterior, and to examine conflicts, the opposing forces at work on any given project.

“From very early on I got interested not in objects, but in the connection of objects,” says Mayne. “Just about all of our [Morphosis Architects] work has been [accomplished by] not seeing a work as singular, but seeing it as multiple, and the immediate discussion is how things relate to one another and making connections. Then that immediately opened up ideas. I mean, part of that connectivity is transparency.”

One recent project highlights both transparency and a direct intervention into the public sphere. The University of Toronto graduate house includes a jutting sign, laterally forcing its way over the middle of the street. A giant O is suspended over the street, acting as a forceful gateway to the campus. It also marks the entrance to a public square interacting with the building’s lobby.

“That was probably the first time we were able to engage a building into the public in that sense, into the city,” says Mayne. “It was really fascinating.”

“I remember being there when they put up the O, the three-dimensional zero. I never say who I am, I just sort of hang out and chat with people, and everyone was on the corner scratching their head saying, ‘What is going on? There’s this great big O hanging over the street.’”

Mayne is consternated and fascinated by our enduring concept of separation. The building goes there, the street goes there and never the two shall meet. He points to European cities where old architecture includes trespasses — archways and large public spaces included in the design — as an example of what was and what should be.

For Mayne, architecture is a dialogue, one that doesn’t necessarily have to be calm. “I think it’s healthy and normal that people have opinions,” he says. “Again, we live in a diverse society and you’re not going to please everyone. It’s not about majority rules in architecture — you’re going to build buildings that people hate. Every interesting city has buildings that are considered hideously ugly and people can make fun of it. I think it’s extremely healthy. Those might be the buildings that you might actually finally fight to save.”

Discussion drifts towards the Calatrava bridge that will span the Bow River and the resulting uproar, both in terms of design and cost. It’s a healthy debate, as far as Mayne can see, but the design issues give him pause.

“By the way, what the hell is ‘Calgary’?” he asks. “[It’s] news to me that there’s some sort of primary idea of what architecture is that’s Calgarian.”

“When I go up there maybe someone will show me what is indigenous, but whatever it is there won’t be much of it, I know that.”

And he’s decidedly unimpressed with big architecture name-dropping as a possible sign that Calgary is growing up.

“It’s funny the argument, I would have thought it would be the opposite,” he says. “It’s like, kind of a yawner. By the way, it’s just the 50th city for him to build a bridge in. Maybe you want to find someone else. If you want to define a city, Calatrava ain’t going to do it, he’s got one in every… you’re way down the line on that one.”