Project Description
“Aw, that was just showing off,” says Antoine Predock, FAIA. He’s
talking about a stunt, made famous in a 1986 photograph he’s sometimes
used as a lecture slide, in which he slalomed down the snow-covered roof
of a building he designed in Taos, N.M.—not far from Albuquerque, where
his practice
has been based for some 50 years. “I’m a skier,” he explains, “and I
spent a lot of decades of my life going off the marked trails.” The
photograph captures a paradox in Predock’s work: On the one hand, the
enthusiasm of this lifelong skier—and motorcyclist, and diver—for the
kinetic, for technologically enhanced speed, and for perception in
motion; and on the other hand, a deep feeling for geology, for the
stillness of mountains and deserts. Most notably, perhaps, there’s an
enthusiasm for architecture that—with stony materiality and eremic
geometry—registers as landscape. (Or at least as something that it would
be great to ski on, weather permitting.) That off-piste trajectory also
reflects the singularly trailblazing-but-backcountry path of this
regionally rooted architect who—despite a 1960s stint in New York and
studies at Columbia University (not to mention a 1985 Rome Prize, a 2006
AIA Gold Medal, and a 2007 Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt lifetime
achievement award)—has largely escaped the categorizations and
approbations found on the coasts.
And, these days, it matters that Predock knows his way around snow. His
landmark new project in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the Canadian Museum for
Human Rights, opened in September 2014, and is weathering its first
sub-zero winter five years after the start of construction and nine
years after Predock’s selection in an international design competition.
The 260,000-square-foot structure features 47,000 square feet of
galleries within a cliff-like tower clad in local Tyndall limestone,
alongside a 7,000-square-foot atrium winter garden partway up the
structure, enclosed by a south-facing swoop of some 5,000 uniquely
shaped glass panels. The whole is topped by a 100-meter-tall crystalline
tower out of the dreams of Bruno Taut. And framing the entrance are
four massive berms, three planted with prairie sweetgrass, one stepped
into an amphitheater.
The museum’s development faced hurdles: a Great Recession budget grown
far past early projections to a reported $351 million Canadian;
wrangling between its private foundations and public administrations;
curatorial controversies about the museum’s treatment of everything from
the history of Canada’s First Nations indigenous peoples (its site at
the confluence of Winnipeg’s Assiniboine and Red Rivers was an
aboriginal trading and meeting place), to the relative status and scale
of exhibits like those on the Armenian Genocide and the Ukranian
Holomodor. Predock, designing his most substantial North American
project outside of the Southwest, faced an icy reception from some. “At
first,” he says, “it was: ‘What, you chose a guy from New Mexico?’ ”
But, characteristically, he frames that as a matter of geology and
ecology: “It’s cold as hell here right now,” he says of Albuquerque in
January. “It’s a high desert, the altiplano, and the land loses
heat to the universe. When you make an event on that tall grass prairie
[in Manitoba],” he says, “it’s like a mountain down here in the
desert.”
There must still have been something of the so-called Bilbao Effect in
the cold Manitoba air back in 2000, when the late Israel Asper, a
Winnipeg-based Canadian media magnate, proposed and seeded the museum
with a $22 million Canadian gift from his family foundation: The notion
that a scrappy city on the global margin could—like Bilbao, Spain, with
its photogenic branch of the Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry, FAIA—seemingly acquire cultural capital with an architectural showstopper. Maybe even a memory of Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House,
from a generation earlier. And, certainly, the Museum of Human Rights’
uncanny form is a big deal on Winnipeg’s boxy skyline and prairie
horizon.
But in Winnipeg, the result is more interesting. Unlike that Spanish
museum (whose overexposed sheen faded as its interiors underperformed
for the display of art), the Museum of Human Rights appears to have been
designed from the inside-out—driven less by photogenic form than by a
cinematically and psychologically immersive experience over time. “It
isn’t a museum of objects,” Predock says. “It’s a museum about ideas.
It’s a process building. It’s a procession building.”
The procession is choreographed and kinetic. Recalling the switchback
canyon roads where he rides his motorcycles, Predock describes the path
through the museum as a “back and forth duality of light and of dark.
It’s a big-picture duality, dark where you begin, light where you
ascend.” At the entrance, “you’re in a chamber with fissures of light
coming in under dark above,” he says. Then “you ascend, like in a John
Cage concert when he would just sit at the piano and not play.” The
ascent leads, “to a narrow space that starts out as a black void. It’s
lined in integrally colored black concrete, not paint or plaster,” and
spanned by ramped bridges clad in luminous alabaster. A full kilometer
of shallow switchback ramps criss-cross that void, leading in and out of
all the galleries (“black-box theaters,” Predock calls them, with
interactive screens and supergraphics by exhibition designer Ralph
Applebaum). “It’s episodic,” Predock says. “Along the way, the bridges
are way stations. When you get onto them, one after the next, you are in
this safe zone, and you can look up at the sky and down to the earth.
You think about what you’ve seen and get ready for the next gallery.
There’s a lot of bad stuff you learn about. But a lot of good stuff too.
You look up and you think: ‘Oh man, I’ve got a long way to go,’ and ‘I
wonder if I’ll make it to that tower.’ ”
Gratifyingly, you can, and into a panoramic lookout by way of more
ramps and a spiral staircase overlooking the atrium winter garden, which
is paved by hexagons of Mongolian basalt buttressing reflection pools.
The garden is also overlooked by foundation and administration offices,
left open to view, “making what’s normally the backstage totally
visible,” Predock says. “You see people hustling, working on human
rights issues in real time. It’s light and bright and the white steel
all around is buoyant, and there’s this animation that you’re picking up
on. It’s about action.”
This building is itself, perhaps, more about action than seamless
completion—more open to personal experience and individual
interpretation than the totalizingly hermetic self-reference to which
many contemporary would-be monuments are prone. There is something of
the deliberate awkwardness of a modern dancer who eschews the pretty
gesture in order to tell you something else: Here, the seams
show—massive nodes of raw structural steel push past the stone and glass
to let you know that for all its volcanic and glacial geomancy, the
building is the work of human industry and intention.
Like the high aspirations and human failings illustrated by the
exhibitions, this building’s finishes are a little rough and its
transitions a little syncopated: An incongruous glimpse of alabaster is
visible from the basalt interior landscape; light seeps into darkness
and darkness into light. The design for the Sydney Opera House by
Utzon—to whose work Predock’s is heir in its primal encounters between
land and sky—was said to have been rescued from the reject pile by Eero
Saarinen, whose work shares with Predock’s its uncategorizable
mutability and its expressive sensibility. Utzon and Saarinen, and now
perhaps Predock, have long served as an irritating conscience to an
architectural profession that has, steadily and calculatedly, settled
for less and less in the aspirational mission of the built environment.
Something about Predock’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights serves as a
reminder that, even as you seek to live out humane values far from the
follies and fortunes that architecture requires, sometimes—however
secularly, however awkwardly, however ambitiously—you also need a
cathedral. —Thomas De Monchaux