"Our objective is to develop a critical practice where creative output engages the contemporary discourse of the discipline through both architectural design and writing," says Thom Mayne, founder and director of Morphosis.

The firm takes its name from the Greek, and literally means forming of shapes. It has done just that by creating a new architectural geometry that folds the fragmented contemporary world into the solid state of contemporary architecture. In fact, Morphosis now numbers 33 architects and designers collaborating in a most unusual architectural practice, one that values the written word as a method of analysis that complements the process of design and construction.

Founded 25 years ago as an effort to break away from the then prevailing postmodern movement in architecture, Morphosis has contributed profoundly to the genesis of "the Los Angeles movement." Los Angeles emerged as an epicenter of architecture for the millennium, sited squarely on the jagged edge of the San Andreas Fault. In Hypo Alpe-Adria Center (Phases 1 & 2, 1999 & 2000), the building rises forth like aluminum tectonic plates heaving up from the earth-urban sprawl's explosive metaphoric confrontation with the rural farmlands of Austria's Klangenfurt. The University of Toronto's Graduate Student Housing (2000) serves a dual purpose as campus gate, thrusting the U of T's name out over Harbord Street in extended beams and glasswork, the final letter "O" an exposed steel scope peering into the intellectual beyond. With Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, California (1999), Morphosis took an "unbuildable" site and carved a man-made canyon into it, bordered by angled, corrugated-steel roofscapes and leaning walls. When he was barely out of school himself, Mayne with a handful of others, founded an institution embracing these same architectural ideals: SCI-Arc.

Morphosis has received 20 Progressive Architecture Awards, 38 AIA Awards, and countless other forms of recognition for its design superiority. Current projects include a federal courthouse in Eugene, Oregon, the new NOAA Satellite Operation Facility in Suitland, Maryland, and the 101 Pedestrian Bridge in Los Angeles.