Thom Mayne: Person Place Thing with Randy Cohen

*This event is occurring as a live webinar. Registrants will be emailed a link to access the program.*

Person Place Thing is an interview show hosted by Randy Cohen based on the idea that people are particularly engaging when they speak, not directly about themselves, but about something they care about. 

Cohen’s guests talk about one person, one place, and one thing that is important to them. The result: surprising stories from great speakers. This installment of Person Place Thing will be a conversation with Thom Mayne, Founding Partner and Principal of Morphosis. 

Ordinarily, this program takes place live, on-stage, but for the duration of the current crisis, we’ll livestream our conversations.

For more information and to hear past episodes, visit PersonPlaceThing.org.

Speakers:
Thom Mayne, FAIA, Founding Partner and Principal, Morphosis
Randy Cohen, Host, Person Place Thing

Thom Mayne founded Morphosis in 1972 as a collective practice of architecture, urbanism and design, rooted in rigorous research and innovation. Working globally across a broad range of project types and scales, Morphosis is recognized for its innovative and sustainable designs for cultural, civic and academic institutions, including the Bloomberg Center at Cornell Tech, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, and 41 Cooper Square, the academic building for The Cooper Union. In 1972, he helped to establish the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Since then, he has held teaching positions at Columbia, Yale (the Eliel Saarinen Chair in 1991), the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Eliot Noyes Chair in 1998), the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands, the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, and many other institutions around the world. He was a tenured Professor at the University of California Los Angeles Architecture and Urban Design (UCLA A.UD) from 1993-2019. There has always been a symbiotic relationship between Mayne’s teaching and practice, evidenced in his concurrent position as Executive Director of the Now Institute, Morphosis’ research arm that collaborates with academic institutions to create design-based solutions for the pressing issues of the day, from mobility, urban revitalization, and sustainability, to public policy, planning, and community outreach. Mayne’s distinguished honors include the Pritzker Prize (2005) and the AIA Gold Medal (2013). He served on the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities under President Obama. With Morphosis, Thom Mayne has been the recipient of 29 Progressive Architecture Awards, over 120 American Institute of Architecture Awards and numerous other design recognitions.

Randy Cohen’s first professional work was writing humor pieces, essays, and stories for newspapers and magazines (The New Yorker, Harpers, The Atlantic, Young Love Comics). His first television work was writing for “Late Night With David Letterman,” for which he won three Emmy awards. His fourth Emmy was for his work on Michael Moore’s “TV Nation.” He received a fifth Emmy as a result of a clerical error, and he kept it. For twelve years he wrote “The Ethicist,” a weekly column for The New York Times Magazine. His most recent book, Be Good: How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything, was published by Chronicle.