Thom Mayne has pushed his firm towards sustainability in a big way. Maybe Morphosis is the best sustainable design firm in Los Angeles (dare I say all of California?) right now or is it? The LAtimes explores the sustainable features of his latest building - the federal court tower in San Franscisco.
The conflict at the heart of the building has been brewing for some time. After all, while we have lately prized famous architects mostly for their Expressionism, green design is based on a different set of priorities. It is by definition local, relying on attention to site and climate, where celebrity architecture is global, dominated by firms with a proven ability to stamp a repeatable brand on any parcel of land in the world, from Milwaukee to Abu Dhabi. It rewards clarity and simplicity more than the complexity Mayne has spent nearly four decades perfecting. It requires architects to think as much about balance as architectural drama.
It might seem unfair to criticize one of our most talented architects on that score. Nobody ever complained that Jackson Pollock was guilty of flinging around too much paint — or that the wood for his frames wasn't harvested in a sustainable manner. And we have always let architects off the hook for cost overruns, inefficiencies and other basic errors as long as their buildings provided a visceral or virtuosic thrill.
But if architecture, unlike painting or sculpture, is at heart an exercise in balancing purely artistic goals with more prosaic ones — budgets, gravity and so on — then green design shouldn't require extraordinary skills or lamentable compromise. And as architects as stylistically opposed as Shigeru Ban and Glenn Murcutt have shown, it's entirely possible to combine sustainability with a bracing sense of creative ingenuity.
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