Thom Mayne: A Problem With Authority

Thom Mayne A Problem With Authority
Thom Mayne hasn't been sleeping well.

The radical L.A. architect, whose edgy designs seem to mirror his notoriously intense personality, keeps waking up from anxiety dreams.

"They're all connected to figures of authority," he says.

We don't need Freud to figure this one out. Mayne, 61, a true child of the '60s, has spent most of his career as a rebel outside the architectural mainstream teaching, entering design competitions, creating dense, hyperkinetic small projects and basically staying faithful to his own gestalt.

(At one point, his funky Santa Monica office was down to half a dozen employees, and Mayne was broke.)

But he's no longer operating on the fringe: this month he'll be awarded the Pritzker Prize at a ceremony in Chicago-the first American to win architecture's highest honor in 14 years. Who knew Thom Mayne was ready for prime time?

But these days, he's frequently zipping between Shanghai and Madrid, and he's exceptionally busy on his home turf, where his big client is-are you ready?-the government.

He's constructing a federal office building in San Francisco, a U.S. courthouse in Eugene, Ore., and a building near Washington for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which opens this fall.

His 13-story California state transit headquarters opened in downtown L.A. last fa