Thom Mayne is a Pritzker Prize winning American architect and educator, who founded the interdisciplinary architecture and urban design firm mOrphosis in 1972. He is the cofounder and executive director of the Now Institute and currently distinguished professor at UCLA s Architecture and Urban Design. Eui-Sung Yi is design principal at Morphosis and director of the Now Institute at UCLA. The Now Institute is an urban research center at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design that applies strategic interdisciplinary thinking to real-world issues.
If given the chance to pick the brains of numerous starchitects about the most important buildings of the 20th century, you'd doubtlessly get a broad--and contentious--spectrum of answers. Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne took on this task after noticing, in the architect's words, a declining awareness of historical precedent among my students. Together with UCLA's Now Institute, Mayne polled 40 architects--including Tadao Ando, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, and others--to list the most influential buildings of the previous century. The results, to be released this fall, have been distilled in 100 Buildings, an essential guidebook for architecture students and design buffs alike, detailing the enduring influence of projects ranging from Villa Savoye to the Vanna Venturi House. --Metropolis Magazine