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Antoine Predock is an Albuquerque architect known for his architecture that resonates with the landscape of the American Southwest, earning him international acclaim and projects as far away as Canada and Costa Rica and famous commissions from Qatar. He died Saturday at his home in Albuquerque. He is 87 years old.
The cause of death was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease, according to his sculptor wife, Constance DeJong.
Mr. Predock’s early buildings were extensions of the desert. In his 1994 monograph, Antoine Predock: The Architect, he wrote that when faced with a vast and intimidating landscape, he was tempted to build something familiar, such as a bank with a classical appearance. “The alternative I chose was to build a building with a similar landscape,” he wrote.
His later buildings, some far from Albuquerque, used materials and finishes appropriate to their locations.But they retain almost pristine geological features Such is the character of Mr. Predock’s best work. These projects range from the San Diego Padres baseball stadium to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to the Flint River Aquarium in Albany, Georgia.
The architectural historian Victoria Young wrote in the Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Architecture that Mr. Predock (pronounced PREE-dock) “returned architecture to a mystical connection to place and human emotion. Many people feel that this connection has been eroded by 20th century life.”
A lifelong skier and motorcyclist – in his 80s he famously commuted to get off work on rollerblades – Mr Predock loved speed. But at the same time, as the critic Thomas de Monchaux wrote in the Architect’s Journal, he was motivated by “a deep feeling for geology, for the silence of mountains and deserts.”
Mr. Predock’s Nelson Fine Arts Center at Arizona State University, Tempe — a largely windowless, sand-colored collection of theater, gallery and studio spaces built in 1989 — appears to rise from the ground. Reviewing the building in The New York Times, architecture critic Paul Goldberger asked how it was possible for a building to be “deeply rooted in the architectural tradition of a place and yet be unlike anything we’ve seen before.” Is it different from any other building?”
He added that Mr. Predock’s “Southwestern buildings were not cute little adobe structures, cloying stage sets for tourist Santa Fe; they were strong, hard-edged, and confident.”
In fact, Mr. Predock was hired by Disney in the late 1980s to create a Western-themed hotel at Euro Disney (now known as Disneyland Paris). His Santa Fe hotel consists of 49 Pueblo-style buildings, and its trails are dotted with symbols of the American West—from half-buried cars to UFOs to drive-in movie theaters. Mr. Predock wrote in his monograph: “The idea of ’thematizing’ architecture in France is dangerous. How literal can it be? How nostalgic should it be? Should it be there?”
Ultimately, he concluded, “I wanted to express the vision of the West that surrounds me every day: a place of imagination.” The result may have been too abstract for Disney, which redesigned the hotel’s theme to reflect its 2006 A tribute to the popular animated movie “Cars” of the year.
Mr. Predock’s most famous project may be the Padres’ stadium, now known as Petco Park. Looking for a building that would help revitalize San Diego’s East Village neighborhood, the Padres turned to Mr. Predock, a rare example of a famous architect designing a modern baseball stadium. He said there’s “a lot of pressure” to base designs on classic parks like Wrigley Field, but imitation would be a “cop out.”
Instead, he designed a stadium that hinted at its industrial setting, surrounded by blocky masonry buildings that helped reduce the stadium complex to a pedestrian scale. Its many notable features include a lawn adjacent to the outfield where fans can watch games while picnicking. The stadium opened in 2004 and was welcomed by the public and developers, who invested heavily in the communities surrounding the stadium.
While Predock has the ability to work with universities, governments and Major League Baseball, he can be provocative. He painted a blood donation center in Albuquerque blood red. He told Mr Demonshaw: “If you’re not constantly scaring people, I don’t think you’re doing your job as an artist.”
Antoine Samuel Predock was born on June 24, 1936, in Lebanon, Missouri, to an engineer father and an artistically inclined mother. (Later, he began calling himself an Albuquerque native because his attachment to the city was so strong.)
In 1957, shortly after attending college in Missouri, he transferred to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque to study engineering. But when he launched an introductory design studio, “it was like a dream come true,” he told the Albuquerque Journal in 2019.
Mr. Predock’s mentor, Don Schlegel, an architecture professor, later urged him to transfer to Columbia University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1962. “He kicked me out,” Mr. Predock said of Mr. Schlegel, whom he believed. .Predock has learned everything UNM could teach him.
After graduating from Columbia University, Mr. Predock traveled across Europe on a scholarship, carrying Indian ink and paper and whittling twigs or Popsicle sticks into drawing tools. He then worked in offices in New York and San Francisco for a time before returning to Albuquerque in 1967 to practice on his own.
His first major project was La Luz, a townhouse community on the city’s west side. Mr. Predock clustered adobe structures along the Rio Grande without affecting much of the site. Upon completion in 1972, he attracted national attention.
While at Columbia, Predock began dating Jennifer Masley, a dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. They married and Mr. Predock returned to Albuquerque with her. There, the couple co-organized workshops for architects and dancers on the power of improvisation.
their marriage is over In divorce. In 2004, Mr. Predock married artist Constance DeJong. “I have always been inspired by the use of light in her work and the serious authority in her work,” Mr. Predock told architecture critic Vladimir Belogorovsky in a 2020 interview (Vladimir Belogolovsky).
in addition For Ms. de Jong, survivors include his sons Jason, a film lighting designer, Hadrian, an architect and artist, and three grandchildren.
In 1985, after a year studying at the American Academy in Rome, Predock’s work evolved from simple modernism to something richer. “He left here, Tony, and came back Antoine,” said Will Bruder, a prominent Arizona architect, adding that Mr. Predock’s transformation inspired younger architects. “He allowed us all to transcend the dogma of modernism,” Mr. Bruder said.
The pinnacle of Mr. Predock’s career came in 2008 with the completion of a new home for the School of Architecture at his alma mater, the University of New Mexico. The school’s studio spaces are clustered behind a large, sand-colored wall: reminiscent of sheer cliffs and Anasazi homes, it acts like a kind of abstract billboard along historic Route 66 .
Mr. Predock’s residential work includes the Rosenthal House in Manhattan Beach, California (1993). He calls the upstairs bedroom covered in translucent panels “sleeping lanterns.” The complex vertical organization of Turkey Creek House (1993) in Dallas allowed its owner, an avid birdwatcher, to observe avian visitors at different elevations.
In 2014, Mr. Predock completed what he calls his “career pinnacle”: the $500-million Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which looks like a pair of clear-glass motorcycle helmets attached to a pile of masonry blocks to support Wine-bottle tower. But it had its detractors: “Vague and incoherent accusations undermine the museum and its architecture,” Zachary Edelson wrote in Architectural Record.
Outside the United States, Mr. Predock designed a journalism school in Qatar and a series of luxury residences in Costa Rica.
Other buildings away from New Mexico include the Down Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (2000) on the campus of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Critic Holland Cote, writing in The Times, called the building “a series of angular volumes clustered together” at a central core—”an abstract, novel version of American monumental architecture.”
Early in his career, Mr. Predock told the architect Oana Bogdan in an interview, “People used to say, ‘Oh, Antoine, you’re just from New Mexico. Activists.'”
“I’m proud of it!” he added. “But wherever I go, I take what I learned here with me. I think my regionalism is transferable.”
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