Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, Mayne began his career as an urban planner after graduating with an architecture degree from the University of Southern California in 1968. Four years later, with five other architects, he formed a new school, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), which aimed to bring to Los Angeles the critical attitude toward the profession that was being practiced at Cooper Union in New York and the Architectural Association in London. The school is still operating, although Mayne now teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Around the time of the founding of SCI-Arc, he founded an architectural firm with two school friends who were also teachers.
Ouroussoff has described Mayne's early works as "militaristic" and characterized by a "brooding aggression." That style was broken by his 1993 design of Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, California, one of his first major public commissions, with two rows of fragmented buildings set on either side of a long central sidewalk "canyon" and a monumental stairway embedded in the hillside that doubles as an amphitheater.
His most recent commission, the result of a design competition, is for a new State Capitol building in Juneau, Alaska.
Internationally, Mayne has designed the Hypo Alpe-Adria Center, a mixed-use bank headquarters in Klagenfurt, Austria; the ASE Design Center in Taipei, Taiwan; the Sun Tower in Seoul, South Korea; and a housing project to be completed next year in Madrid.
Mayne is only the eighth American to be honored with a Pritzker since it was first awarded, in 1979 to Philip Johnson. He is to receive a US$100,000 grant and a bronze medallion on May 31 in Chicago's Millennium Park in a ceremony in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, named for the founder of the prize and designed by the architect Frank Gehry, one of the Pritzker jurors, who won in 1989.
Gehry, who is based in Los Angeles, said he did not think of Mayne as an insurgent so much as an individual. "He's a really authentic architect," he said in a telephone interview. "He's developed his own space and language."
Mayne, too, questioned this persistent characterization of him as contrarian. "I think my clients would tell you I'm a problem solver," he said. "I'm not there to agree with people. I'm there to articulate a point of view."
"Am I insistent and tenacious?" he said. "Absolutely. I could not get this work done if I was not."
At the same time, Mayne added, experience has taught him the necessity -- if not the art -- of compromise. "I've grown up a little bit," he said. "I understand the importance of the negotiation. It is a collective act."
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