Radical unearthings: the new Morphosis exhibition in Paris explores a still optimistic and provocative Californian architectural vanguard.

Thom Mayne, the person, is remarkable for his open curiosity about things and about the ways things go together to make up our contemporary environment. Thom Mayne, the architect, is remarkable for his invention of forms that challenge preconceptions yet establish some fundamental bonds between the individual (the viewer, the person walking or driving), the architectural object and the external world.

There is something archaeological about the work of Mayne's practice Morphosis: a fondness for classification and systemic marking, the characteristic revelation of underlying primal form or massing, the fusion as at Diamond Ranch High School (AR March 2001) of ground and building surface. This sense of a radical unearthing of things is elegantly represented at the current Morphosis exhibition Continuities of the Incomplete being staged on the sixth floor of the Pompidou Centre.

In Paris, visitors can literally walk over a treasury of models and electronic screens as if visiting the site of some fabulous buried civilisation. Ramping up to a vertical video wall, where images are projected of dancers engaged with a Morphosis set--Silent Collisions--for Charleroi Danses, this temporary artificial floor is constructed as a shallow steel cage. Its upper surface folds very slightly (hence an occasional diagonal rib) and is inlaid with glass panels set flush between the silver steel members.

The interior of this room-size vitrine is brilliantly lit, aiding not only the visual articulation of models but also a sense of ceremony. This, in fact, is an architectural exhibition ideally suited to camera phones, with small lights flashing as a visitor's 'discovery' is zapped back to Bordeaux or Tokyo or Venice Beach. This is evidence gathering as a global, sociable activity.

There are contents to seduce the architectural cognoscenti (there are maquettes, for instance, of a basket-like volume--part-womb, part-observatory--to be woven inside the Cooper Union's New Academic Building in Manhattan); but also exhibits that are surely of intrigue to the lay museum goer (meticulous models of east/west slices across New York for both the Canadian Centre for Architecture's 1999 urban ideas competition and Mayne's more recent winning proposal for Olympic housing on the East River, in Queens).

Continuities of the Incomplete doesn't supply much raw information--the text on boards beneath the glass is sometimes illegible. Its success is in evoking the excitement and fecundity of Mayne's formal experiments. Experiments that have evolved from the typological to topological as evidenced in the curvaceous screen walls of the Eugene courthouse (currently under construction) or the serpentine, striated superblocks envisioned for Queens.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

These elongated, even tendril-like fragments share a language of surface (the morphology of Morphosis!) with other vanguard practices today. Yet Mayne's work continues to also recall key architectural propositions of the 1950s and '60s--planning projects by Team 10, the articulated assemblages of Stirling and Gowan--that were social, and political, as well as formal. The Federal Building nearing completion in San Francisco (AR July 2005) and the Carabanchel housing in Madrid suggest that Mayne maintains an optimism about architecture that is both complex and of public use.

Until 17 July www.cnac-gp.fr