Architectural imagination and social conscience are intertwined in the design for Diamond Ranch High School. It is a public high school with 50 classrooms, a gymnasium, cafeteria, administration and parking for 770 automobiles. Total cost for school was $30 million USD. The building presents a detailed story of the design and construction of a single building, by Morphosis. The presentation is a state-of-the-art public school in Pomona, California, offers a level of detail not normally found in architectural monographs.

Designed by Morphosis, principal architect Thom Mayne, the Diamond Ranch High School is an advanced solution of educational space, where the architects have tried to combine aesthetic beauty with a sense of social mission. The building is on a site that was considered too steep to build on with a gradient rising from 1:1 to 1:5. Morphosis took advantage of the changes in gradient to create a series of buildings and playing fields where the architecture and topography interact. The site provided an opportunity to create a place where architecture and environment continually exchange places, fusing landscape and building into a single organic unity.

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The newly opened California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) District 7 Headquarters building designed by Morphosis, located in downtown LA, is the first building project by the State Department of General Services. Not only manage the State highway system, Caltrans is also actively concerned with public transportation systems in California. Like Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and Jose Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the Caltrans District 7 promising that downtown Los Angeles could reclaim its status as one of the most original and vibrant urban experiments in America.

The result of a competition that invited the architects Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands and Benedetta Tagliabue of Barcelona, it was not the kind of competition that commonly requires high class design. The enormous scale, which required packing 1.2 million square feet of office space into a 140,000-square-foot site, give conceive that the city would get a conventional office block. And the project’s modest initial budget, roughly $165-170 million, seemed to leave little room for the architectural innovation to appear.

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If you know Morphosis, then you should in acquaintance with Thom Mayne, a Waterbury, Connecticut born who founded it. The firm was an answer to opposite to the typical kinds of contemporary architecture, which in Mayne perspective failed to address the dislocations in modern society. The 2005 Pritzker Prize winner was honored for bringing the rebellious spirit of the sixties and a “fervent desire for change” into his design.

He said: “Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That’s the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do. At the same time, do I listen? My clients would tell you I’m a farm boy from Tipton, Ind.” Mr. Mayne is very concern to what he called “institionalizing”. Don’t ever imagine that his client will get what they want to know, as Mr. Mayne will keep it in mind. “I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture,” he said. “It’s a very passive, weak profession where people deliver a service. You want a blue door, you get a blue door. You want it to look neo-Spanish, you get neo-Spanish. Architecture with any authenticity represents resistance. Resistance is a good thing.”

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Award-winning American architect Thom Mayne is trusted to design a building in Paris that will be nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower and aims for new heights in innovation. On November 24, Morphosis, his famous firm, won in a competition to design the “Phare,” means it Beacon/Lighthouse Tower, in La Défense, an area of office towers west of Paris. The 68 stories building are exactly located between the Grande Arche and the 1958 exhibition hall CNIT. Imagine it as an elegant silhouette covered with a smooth metal skin, a flickering form, scattered ‘net’ at bottom and stick out warded shoots that led some to judge him the architect of dislocation.

Development company Unibail, in partnership with EPAD, notes the Morphosis project as symbol of breaking the past, also decided to give Mayne faith to show his softer personality. “I’ve shown a softer side; my wife is really teasing me,” Mr. Mayne, 62, said in an interview at Morphosis, his firm in Santa Monica. “The sensuousness of Paris found its way into the project.”

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