American Takes Top Architecture Prize: Thom Mayne is awarded the 2005 Pritzger Prize, the 'Nobel Prize of Architecture.'

Critics have called Santa Monica, Calif.'s Thom Mayne's design for California's Department of Transportation ?EUR??,,????'??Death Star?EUR??,,????'?? architecture.

Thom Mayne, the Santa Monica architect known for his aggressively unconventional designs, has been named the winner of the 2005 Pritzker Prize, the field's most prestigious honor.

Mayne is the first American architect to win the prize since Robert Venturi in 1991 and the first from Southern California since Frank O. Gehry in 1989.

"My first reaction was shock," Mayne, 61, said in an interview at the airy if surprisingly nondescript offices of Morphosis, the firm he co-founded in 1972.

His buildings, often cloaked in canted or folded metal screens, giving them a dramatic silver-gray cast, have a muscular presence. They use fragmented forms to express the anomie of contemporary life - and of sprawling, centerless Los Angeles in particular.

"There is a real authenticity to the work that we liked," said Gehry, a member of this year's Pritzker jury. "There's no denying he has carved out his own path and hasn't strayed from it. He's not copying anybody else."

The Pritzker is often called the Nobel Prize of architecture because of its prestige and because it honors an architect's body of work rather than a particular project. When Chicago's Pritzker family, founders of the Hyatt hotel chain, established the prize in the 1970s, they did so in part because the Nobel Prize did not include an architecture category.

The first Pritzker Prize, in 1979, went to Philip Johnson. In the years since, it has been awarded to elder statesmen - Danish architect Jorn Utzon won in 2003, more than three decades after designing the Sydney Opera House - and younger, more experimental figures, such as last year's winner, Britain's Zaha Hadid, the first female laureate.

The award comes as Morphosis, which built its early reputation with small, idiosyncratic projects such as the Kate Mantilini restaurant in Beverly Hills, is winning huge commissions around the world. An 18-story, $144-million federal office building in San Francisco, a $70-million federal courthouse in Eugene, Ore., and a 165-unit apartment complex in Madrid are all in the works.

Last year, Morphosis landed its biggest commission yet, a residential development in New York that would serve as the Olympic Village for the 2012 Summer Games. Mayne hopes the $1.6-billion complex, designed to house as many as 18,000 people on a 61-acre waterfront site in Queens, will be built even if the city loses its Olympic bid. The firm now employs about 35 people.

"It's been a huge leap," Mayne said. "I'm finally doing the kind of work I always wanted and hoped to."

He will accept the Pritzker Prize, which includes a $100,000 cash award, at a May 31 ceremony at Millennium Park's Jay Pritzker Pavilion, an outdoor concert space in Chicago designed by Gehry.

--Los Angeles Times