Santa Monica architect Thom Mayne on Monday will become the first American in fourteen years to receive his profession's top award. His Caltrans District 7 building opened downtown to mixed reviews last year, but the Pritzker Architectural Prize honors his body of work. Mayne, who helped to found SCI-Arc and now teaches at UCLA, has always been considered a maverick designer and was surprised to get the call. From Robin Pogrebin's piece in the New York Times:

"I've been such an outsider my whole life," he said in a telephone interview from his office at Morphosis, his firm in Santa Monica, Calif. "It's just kind of startling."

Given his reputation as a maverick, Mr. Mayne's selection as this year's Pritzker laureate would seem to signal his induction into the establishment. Indeed, that shift would seem to have begun with his selection for three government projects now rising under the General Services Administration's program to promote "design excellence" in architecture: a glass federal office building in San Francisco that eliminates corner offices in favor of a democratic space, with city views for 90 percent of the workstations; a federal courthouse in Eugene, Ore., that elevates the courtrooms above a glass plinth; and a satellite facility, crowned with 16 antennas and partly submerged in the landscape, for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration outside Washington.

But Mr. Mayne said he saw the prize as a recognition of his iconoclastic approach - and as a mandate to keep agitating.

"I see this as a validation for architecture in general," he said, "and for me to push even harder."

And from Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times:

He's not likely to be the only one surprised by the news. Although Pritzker winners have included several members of the architectural avant-garde, Mayne has been considered one of the most polarizing figures in architecture. His verbal battles with clients and builders are legendary in the profession. And there is nothing traditionally beautiful or explicitly welcoming about his designs.

"I'm interested in conflict and confrontation," Mayne said.

His buildings, often cloaked in canted or folded metal screens, giving them a dramatic silver-gray cast, have a muscular presence. They use fragmented forms to express the anomie of contemporary life — and of sprawling, centerless Los Angeles in particular.

"There is a real authenticity to the work that we liked," said [Frank] Gehry, a member of this year's Pritzker jury. "There's no denying he has carved out his own path and hasn't strayed from it. He's not copying anybody else."

[snip]

The Pritzker is often called the Nobel Prize of architecture because of its prestige and because it honors an architect's body of work rather than a particular project. When Chicago's Pritzker family, founders of the Hyatt hotel chain, established the prize in the 1970s, they did so in part because the Nobel Prize did not include an architecture category.

Gehry received the Pritzker in 1989. Mayne's other Southern California buildings of note include Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona (pictured, by Brandon Welling in the NYT), Kate Mantilini in Beverly Hills and the Crawford House in Montecito.