For now, he’s focused on the challenge of conceiving a place where geniuses can hang out and swap eurekas. Mayne has plenty of experience building for rarefied thinkers: the curvy lockbox of Cooper Union, an astrophysics building for Cal Tech, a satellite control center in suburban Maryland, where a great steel truss, bristling with dishes, hovers over an underground office complex. He is not a delicate designer. His buildings impose themselves on the landscape, inciting more admiration than tenderness. They are as tough as the problems that people inside are trying to solve.
