Release a rendering of a very tall, very shiny glass tower looming over an idyllic mountain village and the Internet goes bananas. That's what happened earlier this week when Morphosis Architects of Los Angeles released its design renderings for a new luxury hotel in Vals, a low-key spa town in the Swiss Alps. The design, conceived by Morphosis founder Thom Mayne, would check in at a whopping 1,250 feet, making it the tallest building in the European Union. — LA Times

Plans for a 381m high luxury hotel tower in a sleepy Alpine village have just been unveiled – and the designer is convinced it will fit right in. But is it any more than a castle in the air? [...]

The new hotel tower, designed by Pritzker prizewinner Thom Mayne’s practice, Morphosis, will shoot up 381m into the clouds (almost a third taller than the Shard), a looming spectre visible for miles around the tiny alpine village. It is a gigantic mirror-clad middle finger aimed at the region [...]. — theguardian.com

[Ray Bradbury's] Cheviot Hills house ... hit the market last May, and sold in a little over a month for $1.765 million [...]

the buyers were Pritzker-Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne, of the firm Morphosis, and his wife, Blythe Alison-Mayne. [...]

the new property owner's plan is to demolish Bradbury's house to put in a new house with three underground levels—one of which will hold a swimming pool—and two stories above ground. — la.curbed.com

From six finalists to three and finally to one, Morphosis Architects will be designing the new U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, as announced by The U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) earlier this week.

Morphosis won against top-name contenders Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Mack Scogin Merrill Elam / AECOM. All top three teams advanced to the competition's final round of presentations and interviews. Submitting designs weren't a requirement. — bustler.net

National Building Museum and Metropolis Magazine contributor Andrew Caruso recently sat down with AIA Gold Medalist Thom Mayne to talk about the early days of his career and the major design school, public projects, and trajectory of work that followed. Thom talks innovation, politics, education… and about debunking his reputation as the “bad boy” of architecture. — metropolismag.com

It is a thoroughly cynical piece of work, a building that uses a frenzy of architectural forms to endorse the idea that architecture, in the end, is mere decoration. Mayne's design appears to put innovative architecture on a literal pedestal — or a plinth, to be exact — while actually allowing it to become peripheral, noticeably separate from the heart of the museum and its galleries. — latimes.com

Thom Mayne of the Los Angeles firm Morphosis Architects wants to inspire curiosity about science, the natural world and technology. And he succeeds. The Perot’s architecture evokes wonder, the way ancient ruins, animal skeletons or petroglyphs do.

A lot of people wish wilfully spectacular architecture like the Perot’s would die off. Mayne, who recently received the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal, shows us what it can do at its best. — bloomberg.com

The American Institute of Architects today selected Thom Mayne to be honored with the 2013 AIA Gold Medal, the organization’s highest honor that an individual can receive. — bustler.net

The building is alluring but unsettling. Is the museum’s 10-story concrete cube splitting apart or being pieced together? Is it being held intact by an enormous brace — a transparent protrusion on the cube’s side containing a 54-foot-long escalator — or is that a destabilizing gash that pierces the building’s body? — NYT