The Architecture of Jürgen Mayer H

The Berlin-based architect Jürgen Mayer claims he's pushing his discipline "beyond the blob". He talks to Miami Art Museum head, Terence Riley

German architect Jürgen Mayer describes his firm's style as "beyond the blob". Dirk Fellenberg

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Jürgen Mayer Alex Laljak

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Berlin-based Jürgen Mayer H. just might be Germany's first starchitect since the days of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. His office, J. Mayer H. Architects (that dangling last letter is actually his middle initial, tacked on so that the firm name sounds generic and everyman), is just 12 years old—and he's only 42—but he and his 15 staffers have already produced acclaimed public buildings from Denmark to Spain. And they've developed a signature style that Mayer describes as "beyond the blob."

His structures' profiles swell or zigzag, and their window patterns can resemble honeycombs or bulging eyes. In fact, the more metaphors his forms inspire, the happier Mayer gets: "Multiple potential readings" are the goal, he says.

A native of a quaintly half-timbered Swabian town near Stuttgart, Mayer studied at the University of Stuttgart, the Cooper Union, and Princeton, and he has taught even more widely (Columbia, Harvard, London's Architectural Association, the University of Toronto). His construction pace has been fiery lately; he's just unveiled a Danish science-park attraction with bite-mark edges and a Karlsruhe university dining hall with canted colonnades, and he's at work completing a mushroom-shape wooden canopy for a Seville plaza. He's also acclaimed for product designs and art installations: knobby furniture, sheets that change color under body heat, flexible glass tile panels, and wallcoverings printed with enigmatic interlocked numbers.

Terence Riley, head of the Miami Art Museum and former architecture and design curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, included Mayer's Seville project in a 2006 MoMA show about adventurous Spanish architecture. Riley recently interviewed Mayer by phone, covering topics spanning Chinese street noise, Iberian religious processions, and his buildings' wild and unmistakable geometry.

I understand you're working in China now?

No, I'm not, and not in the Arab countries either. I guess I'm one of the few architects who isn't.

Why not? What's wrong with you? There's not been some opportunity?

So far the assignments just didn't happen. Why is that wrong? And we are very busy in Europe. There has been no real need to reach out. I have gone to China with my students three times, and with my students at the AA in London, we worked on a concept for a huge new cruise center in Shanghai, with an entire themed experience for departure and arrival. I have some contacts in China, and I would of course be open to a project there, more so now than even just a couple of years ago. Our office is finally big enough, with about 15 people, to handle it.

Would working in Shanghai, Dubai, or any of the other overseas boom economies change your work?

I can only speculate on whether our thinking processes would be dramatically different if we had the chance to realize something on a larger scale and with greater speed than is possible now in Europe or the U.S.

What would you say that China has to teach the West, other than about scale and speed? Is there some part of what's happening in China that you would want to bring back to Europe as a model for growth?

A big challenge there is the mass organization of people, the logistics of infrastructure. That's an area where they'll have to develop more complex expertise, knowledge which I think will then spread to other parts of the world. But I hope that in the process of adapting Western influences, buying into the global world, China doesn't lose its complex sensorial aspect. There is the distinctive noise, the smell, that has a presence on all the senses somehow.

Let's jump continents again. You still live in Berlin, and you're building all over Europe: Denmark, Poland, Spain, Belgium. What's on the boards right now?

We're building a courthouse for Hasselt, in the Flemish part of Belgium, in collaboration with two local firms, Lens°Ass and a2o architecten.