Beyond intuition

I’’m interested in locating my work in terms of its ideas. What’’s the generative trail of architecture—how do you generate ideas?

The general public still relies on this notion that design is located personally, intuitively—that it comes from a certain type of talent. I never believed in that. I was educated in the sixties, and we were already interrogating that idea—it was a highly rationalist view. I’’m trying to make it apparent that first of all, those ideas aren’’t as simple as being intuitive. They’’re borrowed, and—like languages—appropriated. It has an origin in previous architecture.

If you’’re interested in the progress of a language, the evolution of an architecture, you have to have some method of interrogating the broader aesthetic. The rules and the structure that lead you to a particular aesthetic. I guess anybody of my generation would have to have some interest in the location of creativity, the processes of removing certain rational instincts. Jackson Pollock is an example of how things happen because you nurture a certain kind of environment. The notion is: how do we develop our own trajectories within the knowledge of artistic behavior? For me, this is huge territory that has to do with developing a certain type of complexity, finding an architecture which corresponds to the relationship of how we understand the world.

—Thom Mayne, to Australian Design Review