Morphosis, Santa Monica, CA, Thom Mayne, Andrew Zago

Thom Mayne's drawing for the Sixth Street House invokes architectural conventions only to surpass their limitations. By collapsing plan, elevation, and detail through juxtapositions of scale, obliquity, projection, and rotation, Mayne challenges the historical view of drawing as a passive medium at the service of architecture.
Mayne's design involves inserting eleven found machinery parts into a shell wrapping a preexisting bungalow (his own). Reworked into functional elements—staircase, fireplace, shower—these parts, Mayne claims, would bring invention to the site and have "the capacity to embody in built form an imagined prehistory of a place, a contemporary archaeology (past and future) and its subsequent transmission across time." This drawing, which layers a 1:24 detail and a 1:16 elevation or section over a 1:16 plan, functions similarly. The steel parts—represented by cutouts of metallic foil—appear as if unearthed, pulled out one by one, rotated, examined, and set aside, leaving behind the gray traces of their impression. Reassembled like cogs in a wheel, they become constructions of reinvented form.
Mayne is a founding member of both the Santa Monica architectural firm Morphosis and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. His work recalls the machine aesthetic of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde and the archaeological and genealogical methods of Michel Foucault. Originally conceived as the terminus of his investigation—that is, as architecture—Mayne's drawings mimic the parts (found objects) that he reappropriates—each of them, as Mayne says, something "simultaneously 'a part of' its context . . . while isolated, detached, disquieting, critical, and untrustful of the world 'as it exists.'"