What Was the Question?

Thom Mayne’s life appeared to be flashing before his eyes as he presented the work of his firm, Morphosis Architects, in slow, disconnected fragments. The fragmentation was all too literal: addressing a packed audience at SCI-Arc, an institute he co-founded under the banner of iconoclasm over a half-century ago, Mayne relied on four video projectors to plaster the walls with images of his designs and muses, past and present. (He seems to admire Elon Musk.) Mayne proffered a few overambitious themes—“making/material,” “nature/ground,” “context/connection,” and “organization/form”—for connecting the disparate stimuli. The talk was meant to convey the depth of his architectural thinking; perhaps knowingly, it was called, “That’s an Interesting Question.”

But Mayne was less knowing when griping about detractors who evidently reduce his work to flash. “We’re not cake decorators,” he intoned from his seated position while showcasing his Orange County Museum of Art, a swoopy concoction with half-baked detailing that opened last October—mostly to negative reviews. “The criti…