Thom Mayne, back in one piece, came out to Sydney give a lecture last friday. This is the lecture that I spoke about earlier, the one that was being arranged before the East Darling Harbour Competition had been judged and before Morphosis had made the shortlist of said competition.

I have never been a huge fan of their loose-fit aesthetic, and Mayne’s lecture did not do too much to change my mind. It is all a little bit too shiny, a bit too fast for me. The exception was the Diamond Ranch High School which is a solid bit of work; well resolved and neatly crafted and the project for Columbia (I think?) University which looked as though it may exhibit a similar mass. These gems were too far between however and the general mood after the lecture was one of being slightly underwhelmed. Not to mention one patron falling asleep in the front row…

Australians love to cut down a tall poppy and Mayne’s inability to deal with criticism, mouthing off against Elizabeth Farrelly for referring to the Morphosis scheme as being ’sculptural’, didn’t help his cause. I am assuming the remark he took umbrage to was Farrelly’s opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald where she referred to the Morphosis entry as being “wild’n'wacky figuralism”, his counter being that talking about architecture through the lense of mere formalism is too simplistic, that there are always a programmatic rationale for the wild and wacky shapes. That’s fine, however he immediately went on to talk about how their work was like clothing. Clothing, of course, being an acceptable metaphor where sculpture is not… When you are name dropping Issey Miyake I guess it is definitely cooler.

(As an aside, I am also told by sources that a request was made that their scheme not be referred to as the ’slug’ scheme in a journal article. Which is fair enough I guess, ain’t no one wants to be the slug scheme.)

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the night was watching Mayne attempting to position the work of his office from the now daggy deconstructionist dogma, preferring to position it in the jargon of today, using the current buzz words of ‘field condition’, ’tissue’, ’skin’ etc to describe their work. And while the clothing metaphor may be an apt trope for the layering of Morphosis’ buildings, it cannot be argued that Morphosis is not pushing a formal and gestural architectural agenda. Sure, there may be more determing the form of each space other than willful modelling but how this is different from every single other building in the whole wide world I dont know.

And finally, cheekily, I wonder if the other East Darling Harbour teams will have the opportunity of delivering a lecture detailing their ideas on urbanity to their colleagues and members of the competition Jury in the manner in which Morphosis have been?