Pritzker Prize winner Los Angeles architect Thom Mayne will design the new Museum of Nature & Science, joining the local Pritzker Prize parade that includes I.M .Pei, Renzo Piano, Sir Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas. These four winners of architecture's highest award all have buildings in the downtown Arts District.
"Historians will look back on the 20th century as a second renaissance, especially in the sciences," he said. "Every day our understanding of our world changes, so I want the museum to be part of that, to be explicit in its ideas, but also to a welcoming civic place."
Yet if history is any guide, the new museum will also be formally complex and unarguably iconic. Mr. Mayne is not a tentative, hedge-your-bets architect. In his embrace of technology, aggressive use of materials and eye-popping structural inventiveness, he and his firm, Morphosis – a synonym for change and transformation – focus on what it means to be contemporary, "on that which is difficult, because it is difficult, and by its difficulty worthwhile."
