James Michelin Distinguished Visitors Program

Thom Mayne is one of the world's leading architects. His honors include the Pritzker Prize (2005) and the AIA Gold Medal (2013). As one of the founders of the Southern California Institute of Architecture in 1972, there has always been a symbiotic relationship between Mayne's teaching and practice. He is a tenured professor at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design and has held teaching positions around the world, including at Columbia, Yale, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Morphosis designed the Cahill Center, which opened in 2009, to house Caltech's top-ranked astronomy and astrophysics faculty and graduate students in a building dedicated to their needs. According to the firm's website, the Cahill Center "is the result of a series of forces that collide to produce unique spaces of discovery…. As one moves through the space, formal fragments coalesce to reconstruct the interactions among light, architectural elements, and bodies as physical traces of the institution's new ideas."