Thom Mayne (born 1944) is an American architect based in Los Angeles, the founder and principal of Morphosis, who received the Pritzker Prize in 2005. Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, he studied architecture at the University of Southern California and later at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and first worked as an urban planner. In 1972 he left Cal Poly Pomona with five other students and teachers to found the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), meant to bring a stronger social conscience to architectural education. He has taught at UCLA, where he held tenure, and at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and the Bartlett.
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Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona (2000), with Thomas Blurock Architects, sits on a steep hillside once thought unusable. The Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in Los Angeles (2004), a state transport office, was singled out when he received the Pritzker Prize for its environmentally conscious design. 41 Cooper Square in New York (2009), for the Cooper Union, and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas (2012), a large cube floating over a landscaped base, followed.
