When the Northridge earthquake hit Los Angeles in 1994, architect Antoine Predock, FAIA, found himself sitting in his Venice, California, office with no clear means to get to LAX airport and a need to visit a job site halfway around the world. Undeterred, he strapped on the roller skates he used to cruise the beach area and made his way to his flight on time. It was typical of the always enthusiastic Predock, who liked to camp on his prospective building sites, ski off their roofs when possible and cruise through the American Southwest on his motorbike. His death on March 2 deprives us of an architect who not only had one of the most singular visions, deeply rooted in landscape, in the United States, but was also, as Thom Mayne, FAIA, noted in a message to me, “a special person…he was of course an architect of extraordinary talent but above all a beautiful passionate caring human being who maintained a childhood optimism & inquisitiveness to the end.”
What Predock brought to architecture in the almost fifty years he practiced after opening his office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1967 was a sense that both spaces and objects should unfold out of the earth rather than being placed on them. His best buildings were humanmade caves, mesas, or hills that sheltered luminous environments. He developed the idea of the “landscraper,” a term he first used for his Alto, New Mexico, Spencer Theater in 1997, and that he let me steal from him as the title of a book I wrote about such horizontal masses that jut out of and sail across the landscape. From that unfolding of the earth his buildings could rise up to find places where your eye would move ever further into the distance, as in the open courtyard at the top of the classroom and academic building he designed in 1992 for the Cal Poly Pomona (now sadly torn down). There you were meant to sit and watch both the jets lining up towards that same LAX forty miles to the west and the stars making their only seemingly slower way through the heavens.
Predock’s took time to develop what I think of as his mature mode of often sand- or buff-colored masses, angular and enigmatic in form, that sheltered deeply shadowed places of gathering. His first major project, La Luz del Oeste in Albuquerque (1970), took the interpenetrating and weaving modules developed by the architects who banded together in the Team X group in Europe, but also the courtyard housing tradition of the Southwest, and updated them. It then transformed those forms into tightly packed courtyard houses, paseos, and shaded community spaces for a housing development. It was deservedly recognized last year as a National Landmark.
He then developed his forms in private homes and small community projects that gave him the chance to explore both geometry and form making, paring his minimal sensibilities down to emphasize the stretch of spaces and the continuity of form with the land. Though he might have come across as a mystic, he was fully aware of and involved with both technology and popular culture. He pointed out that he saw his work as rising up in the manner of the kind of upthrust that occurs when seismic plates collide, revealing eons of geologic strata. The last of these, he would emphasize, contained crushed beer cans and cigarette butts, as well as all the other detritus produced by the Anthropocene, and was as much part of the construction as the layers of stone.
It all came together in 1989 at the Nelson Fine Arts Center for Arizona State University in Tempe. There he assembled a collage of stairs, roofs, angled planes, and other fragments to form a pyramid containing not a tomb, but a cool, sunken space like one you would find at the bottom of a slot canyon, as well as a museum, classrooms, a performance center, and offices packed into tight masses. You could climb on the outside and watch movies projected on one of the blank walls (or that was the idea) from the stepped volumes. The building abstracted and deformed the surrounding institutional hulks of the campus into something closer to the volcanic hills that pop up all over the Valley of the Sun.
With his career taking off in the 1990s, Predock opened an office in Los Angeles and pursued projects first up and down the West Coast, and then around the world. In 2004, he won the competition for the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum on Taiwan with what I think would have been his most spectacular design (I was a member of the jury making the award), but it was stolen away from him in an ugly political process. He did manage to make other striking structures in places for away from the Land of Enchantment, though. These include most notably the 2014 Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Canada. Its bulging, whirling shape is so iconic that it wound up on the Canadian $10 bill.
A lifelong resident of Albuquerque, Predock was able to design the University of New Mexico’s architecture school building (he had studied engineering there, before obtaining his architecture degree at Columbia University) and donated his archive to the School. He also brought a little of the Southwestern terrain, from its sparse abstraction and stretched horizon to its sprawl of human structures to the moments of respite that open up in its canyons, along its rivers, and in its oases, to almost all the buildings he designed. That did not always work; sometimes his structures seemed alien in their context. But in the best designs, the sense of wonder, awe, and the joy of making architecture still comes through in every stone and angle, every wall and sloped roof, and especially every courtyard and rooftop viewing spot.
As Mayne noted, Antoine Predock was also a generous designer with an acute sense of place. Wherever he went, he brought his sketchbook, quickly fixing on paper the outlines of the cityscape of Seoul or a corner of New York. He would then give those sketches out, and many of us who had the pleasure of knowing the man will long cherish one of those drawings. Impish and irreverent, obsessed with speed and motion, he was always looking at and trying to understand the landscape through which he moved incessantly so that he could turn it into the beautiful buildings that remain as his legacy.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: Dhaka, Bangledesh |
Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.
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