A Blueprint for Making a Difference : Trend: Award-winning architect Thom Mayne explains to a Laguna Art Museum audience his theories and visions.

LAGUNA BEACH —  Creative wizards tend not to seem altogether human in public, but Thom Mayne jokes easily about his fascination with complexity and hard-to-grasp ideas. Lecturing to a large crowd at the Laguna Art Museum on Thursday night, the tall, bearded Santa Monica architect gestured toward his wife in the audience.

“My chief critic tries to get me to cut out the intellectual bull,” he said amiably. Such a goal is probably impossible because he wraps his thoughts in complicated phrases and wide-ranging cultural references. Still, he was able to convey the gist of the fresh, contemporary thinking that has produced numerous award-winning private homes, restaurants and other buildings in Southern California and elsewhere.

The lecture, illustrated with slides of numerous projects, was an attempt to spell out some of the ideas contained in “Morphosis: Making Architecture,” a set of drawings, models and mixed-media renderings at the museum through June 9.

Mayne, 47, recalled his undergraduate architecture training at USC in the ‘60s as being concerned with broader social and political issues, and being imbued with “a great belief in the vision of the future.”

Today, on the other hand, “we live in the present, and the future is extremely ambiguous,” he said. But he finds himself “stuck with a lot of stuff from my past, aspirations of larger visions.”

It frustrates him that the powers behind large social projects--housing projects, schools--no longer are interested in exploring creative architectural solutions. Instead, his firm is designing expensive restaurants, boutiques and houses.

“I’m a bit antagonistic,” he admitted. “I’m finding it a bit of a problem--certainly at the level of the client.”

After a ripple of sympathetic laughter subsided, he added that making concessions is, of course, part of the pragmatic business of architecture--being a political theorist is not the same as being a politician.

And yet it is theory--or rather, turning theory into idiosyncratic buildings--that excites Mayne. Two notions are of particular interest to him, he said. One is context, which normally means the way a new structure connects with buildings that already exist. For Mayne, context also entails a confrontation with existing architecture, expressive of the fragmented, discontinuous condition of the contemporary world.

The other notion has to do with the physical construction of buildings and the use of basic materials: steel, stone, concrete, wood.

“We are very interested in making versus the conventional notion of designing, “ Mayne said. Invoking the simile of testing a Formula One race car, he said the firm’s work “has to do with trial and error, changing the suspension and taking it around the track.”

Architecture, Mayne says, is “a profession that’s an extension of your body.” He likens the use of architectural detail to DNA coding (“the smallest cell talks about the larger organism.”). He likes the idea that buildings are “handmade by human beings.” And he thinks high-tech buildings are old hat.

Instead, he talks about “using technology to talk about ideas that have to do with human aspects of technology.” Morphosis’ “barking dog” lamp--which growls and shines a beam of light at the sound of clapping hands--was meant to poke fun at technology.

The firm’s models and drawings are part of the visceral process of making. Working on a fragment of a model led to the idea of “an architecture made up of fragments,” Mayne said. The idea was realized in a house that embodies 10 elements of “discarded technology”--in this case, windows, doorways, fireplaces, stairways and other elements of previous buildings.

Making the mixed-media drawings “frees you from all the pragmatic aspects of the work” and reveals its underlying structure. It also incorporates the collective ideas of the firm, because teams of architects work on the drawings.

“So much (architectural) work is personal today,” Mayne the maverick remarked rather unexpectedly during the brief question session after his talk. “It’s a sad document of our time. It leads to a lot of very bad, self-absorbed architecture. . . . Architecture is a collective aspiration. It has to be about broader culture.”

He seems to thrive on contradiction. Insisting that he and his partner are “extremely traditional architects,” not pie-in-the-sky theoreticians, he said, “we’re interested in sites and buildings that fit, light, gravity, all the stuff that makes architecture--bathrooms, sinks.”

On the other hand, he told the story of a client initially fascinated by Stonehenge and the movements of the sun and stars--but increasingly nervous, to the firm’s chagrin, about not having a conventional house.

Later, someone in the audience asked him how much input clients had in his projects.

“A tremendous amount,” he said.

Talking about architecture with the client means having “a very abstract conversation” in which both parties are at sea. He doesn’t know until he finishes the process what the building will be. And the clients? “They get a little scared once in a while.”

“Morphosis: Making Architecture” remains through June 9 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission: $2, general; $1, seniors and students. The final lecture in this series, by architecture critic Aaron Betsky, will be Thursday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $10. Information: (714) 494-8971.