Thom Mayne (b. 1944) is an American architect from Waterbury, CT. He studied architecture at the University of Southern California (1968) and also studied at Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1978. He helped found the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in 1972, where he is a trustee. The goal of the new institute was to reinvigorate formal architectural education with a keener sense of social conscience. SCI-Arc was “to bring to Los Angeles the critical attitude toward the profession that was being practiced at Cooper Union in New York and the Architectural Association in London.” Since then he has held teaching positions at SCI-Arc, the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is principal of Morphosis, an architectural firm in Culver City, California. In 2013, he contributed a foreword to the book "Never Built Los Angeles" by Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin.
Mayne has been the recipient of many distinguished awards over the course of his career. Among them are the Rome Prize Fellowship, which he received in 1987, and the Pritzker Prize in 2005. Mayne was a member of the Holcim Awards global jury in 2006 and a member of the Holcim Awards jury for the region of North America in 2005. In 2009, he was appointed a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. He was elected to the board of trustees of SCI-Arc in 2011.
