Politics & Power Quote by Thom Mayne

Mayne is taking a swing at a familiar modernist alibi: the idea that “autonomy” grants art (and by extension architecture) permission to stop answering to anyone. It’s a clean, seductive argument because it flatters the maker. If the work is autonomous, then criticism from the “public” can be dismissed as noise, and messy civic demands become external contaminants. Mayne calls that move “too simplistic” because it confuses independence with isolation.

The intent is surgical: salvage autonomy from the people who use it as an escape hatch. In architecture, autonomy has historically meant discipline-specific rigor: form, structure, space, the internal logic of making. Mayne’s subtext is that this rigor doesn’t evaporate the moment a building touches politics; it becomes more necessary. You can maintain formal intelligence while acknowledging that every commission is a negotiation with power, money, regulation, land use, labor, and unequal access. Pretending otherwise is not purity; it’s abdication.

Contextually, Mayne comes out of a late-20th-century culture war in architecture: star-driven formal experimentation on one side, socially minded urbanism on the other. His line tries to dissolve the false binary. “Turning away from the public” reads as both an ethical failure and a strategic error: architects who retreat into self-referential discourse forfeit legitimacy and let other forces shape the city unchallenged. The rhetorical trick is the pairing of “simultaneously” and “connections” - autonomy isn’t a bunker, it’s a stance you carry into the real world, where the work inevitably takes sides whether you admit it or not.