Craig Hodgetts, Mark Mack, and Thom Mayne to retire from UCLA AUD
Their collective dedication to the university spans more than 100 years
At the end of this academic year, we will bid farewell to three esteemed faculty members who will retire from the Department of Architecture and Urban Design (UCLA AUD) in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture (UCLA Arts): Professor Craig Hodgetts, Professor Mark Mack, and Distinguished Professor Thom Mayne. Their collective dedication to the university spans more than 85 years, and they each leave an indelible mark and inspiring legacy through the research they undertook, the students they taught, and the programs they shaped, including the post-professional program at the IDEAS campus near Culver City.
“Craig, Mark, and Thom have inspired generations of students and colleagues with their verve, tenacity, and strikingly original work,” reflected UCLA AUD Chair Heather Roberge. “Their contributions to the discipline and practice of architecture, and to the department, have influenced and shaped discourse and the built environment across five decades. As we chart the future of UCLA AUD, we will continue to build on their remarkable, compelling legacies and the strong foundation that they have helped to create in the department.”
Professor Craig Hodgetts is a principal with Mithun | Hodgetts + Fung, the Los Angeles wing of Mithun, a national architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and interior design practice which recently merged with Hodgetts + Fung, co-founded with partner Hsinming Fung in 1984. Hodgetts is known for employing an imaginative weave of high technology and storytelling to invigorate his designs, producing an architecture that embraces contemporary ideology, information culture, and evolving lifestyles. With a broad-ranging background in automotive design, theater, and architecture, his practice has created a spectrum of award-winning projects, including the UCLA Towell Library, the new acoustical shell for the Hollywood Bowl, renovation of the historic Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, the LACMA exhibition California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way, and Wild Beast Pavilion at the California Institute of the Arts. Hodgetts’ published works include articles on the arts, architecture, and entertainment. He is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including the AIACC Firm Award (2008), the AIA Gold Medal (2006), AIA Los Angeles Educator of the Year (2004), and was an honoree of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994.
Hodgetts began teaching at UCLA in the early 1970s and became a tenured faculty member of UCLA AUD in 1994. He has been instrumental in developing the M.Arch.II curriculum, a post-professional program that combines theory and practical applications with industry collaborators. During the 2014–15 academic year, he led the IDEAS Mobility Studio in collaboration with Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, leading to innovative and practical proposals for regional transit tube networks, hyperloop stations and vehicle handling, and vehicle design. Inspired by Elon Musk’s bold proposal to create a super high-speed transportation system, the studio garnered significant attention and acclaim. More recently, during the 2017–18 academic year, the research that grew out of Hodgetts’ Gridlock: A Master Plan for the Sunset Strip Circa 2050, resulted in an exhibition at the Architecture + Design Museum in Los Angeles and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York.
Tomorrow, Hodgetts will launch his latest publication, Swimming to Suburbia and Other Essays at Archinect Outpost located in the Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles.
Professor Mark Mack founded Mack Architects in 1985 and relocated the practice from San Francisco to Venice, CA in 1993. With his firm, Mack has completed a broad range of projects including mixed-use, hospitality, housing, cultural, and institutional buildings in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Among his many awards, Mack Architect(s) was awarded the Korea National Housing competition to develop a new model of low-density residential and sustainable community living near Seoul, Korea. Throughout his career, Mack’s work has been the subject of numerous publications and museum exhibitions including Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985 at LACMA in 2018. Alongside his architectural practice, Mack founded Western Addition, a San Francisco-based organization devoted to fine architecture that was in operation from 1978–1986, and was co-founder and editor of Archetype Magazine.
Mack began his academic career as a professor at UC Berkeley where he taught from 1986 to 1993. He began teaching as a visiting instructor at UCLA AUD in the early nineties, and permanently joined the faculty in 1994. Through his work in Los Angeles relating to issues of growth and density and public and private space, Mack developed a central interest in housing as an architectural typology. At UCLA, these themes, combined with topical issues including those around media and performance, have been the basis upon which Mack has shaped his design and research studios. Recent IDEAS Entertainment Studios led by Mack in 2016–17 and 2017–18 include “Performance and Media Technology,” in which, among other projects, students designed and built their own instruments and formed a band and “Performance Architecture,” where students explored left-over, in-between spaces in Los Angeles as opportunities for activation by temporary interventions. He has also directed a core sequence of the UCLA AUD curriculum, the Comprehensive Design / Steel House Studio, for more than a decade.
To celebrate his involvement in post-modernist publishing of architecture in the late 1970s, Mack will be holding a symposium on Monday, March 18, from 6–8:30 PM at Perloff Hall. His guests will include Kurt Forster of Oppositions, Diane Ghirado of Archetype, and Steven Holl of Pamphlet, among others.
Distinguished Professor Thom Mayne is the founder and design director of Morphosis, an influential architecture firm known for pushing the boundaries of design while engaging in projects that exist in the hybrid space between architecture and urban planning. Working globally across a broad range of project types and scales, Morphosis is recognized for its innovative and sustainable designs for cultural, civic and academic institutions, including the Bloomberg Center at Cornell Tech, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, and 41 Cooper Square, the academic building for The Cooper Union. As founding principal of Morphosis, Mayne provides overall vision and project leadership to the firm. He is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including the Pritzker Prize (2005), the AIA Gold Medal (2013), and the Centennial Medal from the American Academy in Rome (2009); and he served on President Barack Obama’s Presidential Committee on the Arts and Humanities (PCAH).
Mayne began teaching at UCLA in 1992, and joined the UCLA AUD faculty as a tenured professor in 2000. There has always been a symbiotic relationship between Mayne’s teaching and practice. At UCLA, Mayne founded and has served as executive director of the Now Institute, a research center that creates design-based solutions in response to the pressing issues of our time, from mobility, urban revitalization, and sustainability, to public policy, planning, and community outreach. Through the Now Institute, Mayne has been instrumental in the development of department’s much sought after M.Arch II post-professional degree program, and has played an important role in UCLA’s Grand Challenges initiative, providing visionary research and proposals that explore a sustainable future for Los Angeles in 2050. Born out of his service on President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and involvement with Turnaround Arts, and fueled by the power of design-based thinking at all levels of education, Mayne founded the Thom Mayne Young Architects program in 2017 to provide elementary school children at underperforming schools with an introduction to architecture that hones their problem-solving skills across all areas of their education.
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