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Mr. Predock came to New Mexico as a student in the late 1950s, a change that was profound for a kid from the Ozark mountains of Missouri. The sparse landscapes, ocher tones, and crisp desert light became the guiding forces in his life’s work.
He also immersed himself in the region’s unique and sometimes offbeat Americana. Mr. Predock (pronounced PREE-dock) hit the trails on his beloved motorcycles, including his prized 1951 Vincent Black Shadow, painting jungles, ancient Pueblo and Anasazi cliff dwellings, and A roadside stall celebrating UFO conspiracy culture.
He describes himself as a “cosmic modernist” dedicated to exploring local material and cultural histories. “Landscape architecture,” writes Architect magazine. One of his first major projects was the La Luz townhouse development in Albuquerque, which began in 1967 and sits like an outcrop of rust-colored rock in the scrub.
Opening of performing arts complex In 2004, Pima Community College in Arizona rose like a desert Stonehenge. At the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Mr. Predock designed the American Heritage Center (1993) as an “archival mountain” along the axis of the surrounding peaks.
“Architecture is a personal, poetic and spiritual encounter with place,” he said in 2020. “Architecture should emerge from its place. Architecture should be a ride – a choreographed, physical ride and an intellectual ride.”
Road cuts—cutting the sides of slopes to create highways—became one of his favorite metaphors. At the bottom are layers of prehistoric stone. “Go down the road and you’ll see beer cans and McDonald’s wrappers and maybe even a cow skull,” he told an audience at the University of Oregon in 1983. Architecture, he said, became human “interlopers. ” connection with the real world. land.
As Mr. Predock’s work spread throughout the Southwest, New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in 1990 that his projects were “similar to those at tourist resorts in Santa Fe and elsewhere.” “Cute little adobe building” has nothing to do with it.
“Tough, hard-edged, and confident, most people would think of them as modernists rather than traditionalists,” he writes. “Yet, unlike most modernism, which was indifferent to its surroundings, Predock’s buildings belonged where they were.”
At the same time, Mr. Predock began to look wider. His first foothold on the West Coast was a classroom and laboratory building at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. Completed in 1992, the building juts forward like the bow of an ocean liner. (The building was demolished in 2022 after fault lines were discovered underneath.)
In San Diego, Mr. Predock bucked the trend toward retro-style ballparks of brick and ivy. Opened in 2004, Petco Park has more than 40,000 seats and is clad in sandstone and stucco, becoming one of the pillars of the city’s East Village neighborhood revitalization. Mr. Predock said he sought to reimagine a sports center as a vast Southern California garden.
“I don’t like single-row buildings where you walk in and see everything at once,” he told The Associated Press. “It should be more of an accumulation of events, experiences and perceptions.”
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg incorporates some of the architectural themes Mr. Predock has explored for decades. The base is two curved glass and steel facades. A tower soars into the sky like a watchtower or lighthouse.
After the museum opened in 2014, many critics struggled to decipher Mr. Predock’s message. Gareth Davis wrote in The Guardian that the building “rises out of the midwestern plains like a pierced truffle, although his vision was of a tower surrounded by glass clouds.” Wrapped mountains.”
The museum has been mired in controversy, including how to adequately represent rights struggles and depict the stories of Canada’s Indigenous people, but Predock’s design was part of a new $10 bill released in 2018 that featured civil rights activist Viola Viola Desmond. (Mr. Predock kept a copy of the bill in his wallet.)
Mr Predock has also undertaken other projects around the world, including a resort community in Costa Rica and a media and communications school in Doha, the capital of Qatar. But he stressed that his creations, no matter where they are built, carry the essence of the American desert.
“My beginnings in the Southwest are clearly visible,” he told The Washington Post. “My start here made me focus on where the sun was, where the wind was, the power of the site…I carry that baggage with me.”
Antoine Samuel Predock was born on June 24, 1936 in Lebanon, Missouri. He joked that he had no idea about architecture growing up, “except that I lived in a house.”
However, he credits his parents with instilling the elements required of future architects. From his engineer father, he said, he developed a mechanical and structural sense. His mother, a teacher, conveyed the power of art by reading poetry to him.
“It took me a long time to realize its value and the mark it had on me,” he recalled to Architectural Digest in 2006.
He began studying engineering at the University of Missouri before transferring to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1957. While taking an introductory course in design, he decided to study architecture.
A professor named Don Schlegel urged Mr. Predock to transfer to Columbia because he believed he would benefit from a more rigorous program. “He kicked me out,” recalled Predock, who earned an architecture degree from Columbia University in 1962.
He then traveled throughout Europe. Armed with a sketchbook and India ink, he drew with sharpened sticks or broken shells—he would later encourage art students to find a connection with nature. Mr Predock was riding his motorcycle in Spain when he stumbled upon the Moorish architecture of the Alhambra. “This moving and unforgettable encounter revealed a spatial realm that inevitably influenced my architectural path,” he wrote in an article.
He found work at architectural firms in New York and San Francisco before returning to Albuquerque in 1967 to open his own studio.
Mr. Predock’s residential projects include the Rosenthal House (1993) in Manhattan Beach, California, whose bedrooms are covered in translucent panels that he calls “sleeping lanterns.” The first phase of the ziggurat-looking Turtle Creek House in Dallas was completed in 1987 and was designed to provide multiple observation levels for the owner, an avid birdwatcher.
On the East Coast, the Down Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (2000) at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, is a maelstrom of geometric fragments and confusing angles. “If you’re not constantly scaring people, I don’t think you’re doing your job as an artist,” he told Architect Magazine of his overall philosophy.
In 2008, Mr. Predock completed a new campus for the University of New Mexico School of Architecture, whose studios are located behind a large coffee-colored wall along Route 66, one of the original long-distance routes connecting Chicago to the Pacific. .
“Route 66 is a symbol of the true Wild West, when land was a commodity … and the car was your friend,” he said. “A similar commercial dance occurred along the Silk Road, and the reasons were strikingly similar.”
In 2005, Mr. Predock received the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal, one of the profession’s highest honors.
His first marriage, to Jennifer Masley, a former Metropolitan Opera ballet dancer, ended in divorce. In addition to de Jong, the sculptor to whom he was married for 20 years, survivors include two sons from his first marriage and three grandchildren.
Mr. Predock typically begins a design by working out proportions and lines in clay. He sees the serendipity of the shapes as similar to what he keeps discovering in the desert.
“The mystical quality of the desert is central to my work ethos,” he says. “You think you’ve got it, you think you understand it. And then you turn over a rock and you find other worlds, other realms within it.”
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