I have a preference for rough architecture, real, inexpensive, unfinished.

— Thom Mayne

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions anymore.

— Thom Mayne

In architecture, you arrive so late. I look at doctors, lawyers I know, and they're all buying boats and bailing out at 62. My career is just getting started.

— Thom Mayne

I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don't have to understand it. You may not like it. That's OK.

— Thom Mayne

I've always been interested in an architecture of resistance - architecture that has some power over the way we live. Working under adversarial conditions could be seen as a plus because you're offering alternatives. Still, there are situations that make you ask the questions: 'Do I want to be a part of this?'

— Thom Mayne

So at a time in which the media give the public everything it wants and desires, maybe art should adopt a much more aggressive attitude towards the public. I myself am very much inclined to take this position.

— Thom Mayne

Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that.

— Thom Mayne

The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.

— Thom Mayne

The age of recalcitrance is over. The best solution is no longer just to regurgitate a 19th-century design.

— Thom Mayne

You might say that when you step inside, you're entering an honorific space, but that's something totally different from experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.

— Thom Mayne