Thom mayen & Morphosis recently won the International Competition for the design of the “Phare” Tower (Lighthouse), the centerpiece of a redevelopment in the business district, La Défense, just outside of Paris.
Development company Unibail, in partnership with EPAD, notes the Morphosis project as symbol of breaking the past, also decided to give Mayne faith to show his softer personality. “I’ve shown a softer side; my wife is really teasing me,” Mr. Mayne, 62, said in an interview at Morphosis, his firm in Santa Monica. “The sensuousness of Paris found its way into the project.”
Thom Mayne equalized the building as a “layered dress” or a woman’s slip. “The skin becomes primary, the body secondary,” he admitted. “It becomes metabolic, the skin. It moves.”
Mayne said the building still needed more perfection, because he only spent 3 months in development before deadline. While the outer skin is currently perforated stainless steel for first draft, it might be another finishing by the time he is finished. For studying the site he had hired a fashion photographer to shoot the site over an extended period, taking the picture at different times as he revolved around it, so Mayne can be able to catch the sense of how the light shifts throughout the day and seasons. He even doesn’t really sure what will happen in the future, with his usual nature. “I produce something, attack it, it moves, it changes, it responds to the nature of that critique, it happens reiteratively till we’ve exhausted the idea. Then it’s complete, it’s done. I’m not done. I just started.”
Mayne’s winning was an ironic news for Jean Nouvel, one of the 10 architects in the competition that included big architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Norman Foster, because he had already designed a tower for the Phare ~also known as Tour Signal~ site in 1989; his cylindrical “Tour Sans Fin” and it was never built until nowadays. Again we should thank to Mayne’s wife for inspiring him with the sexy execution of resistance architecture.
