Architect Antoine Predock wins praise for creating 'fearlessly expressive' symbols

12:05 PM CST on Wednesday, December 14, 2005

By DAVID DILLON / The Dallas Morning News

Antoine Predock lives just off Route 66, the great American road that runs from Chicago to Los Angeles past his downtown Albuquerque studio. Most architects couldn't care less, whereas he has found its motel, low-rider, rubber-tomahawk culture a bottomless source of inspiration. He is a Western architect who really understands the West, not just the purple mountains' majesty but also the myths, the marginal cultures, the haunted perspectives generated by too much space and too few people.

Timothy Hursley

Memorial Hall in the McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota, a monumental granite and glass space, serves as one of the cultural crossroads of the university.

In awarding him its 2006 Gold Medal last week, the American Institute of Architects praised his buildings that "grow out of their unique landscapes, creating symbols that are fearlessly expressive, complex and guileless."

And remarkably different from one another, as well. What Antoine Predock brings to the drawing board is not a style as much as a process, a way of looking at the world that he calls "spiritual excavation," and that has as much to do with geology and archaeology as architecture.

He talks about "inhabiting" a site instead of just looking at it. He once designed a house by running up and down a hillside to find the best orientation, then connecting his footprints to create the plan. He encourages his students to draw with something found on the site to help them bond with it.

"Land and culture are one event," he says. "The relatively thin layer of cultural time rests on a much deeper layer of geological time, and both have to be explored. You can't jump to conclusions about how a building should look based on what happened yesterday. You have to get past that, go deeper, look out of the corner of your eye."

He has been doing precisely this for 40 years.

His Las Vegas Library, for example, looks past the casinos and showgirls to explore the Indian encampments and railroads and Mormon settlements that predated the arrival of Bugsy Siegel. As a result, the building traces a history that most residents didn't even know they had.

The American Heritage Center and Art Museum in Laramie, Wyo., is housed in a dramatic copper cone that erupts from the landscape like a volcano. But this is not gratuitous form-making. One axis aligns with the distant mountains, a second with the town grid.

At the Rose House in Highland Park, he dispensed with the big lawn and the ceremonial driveway in favor of a terraced wall of stone, through which visitors pass as through a fissure in a canyon to arrive in a lush green world of trees and running water.

Abstractions of geological strata, from canyons to road cuts, are a familiar theme in his work, from the McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota to the new Austin City Hall that features a tapering limestone lobby topped by a faceted copper ceiling that functions as an artificial sky.

Yet the exploratory process is the same when he is working in the Far East as in the Far West. In designing the National Palace of Art in Taiwan, he traveled the Silk Road, looking at caves, shrines and mountain villages to create a simulated jade and ice mountain, the cooling mountain of the Chinese scrolls, covered in a kind of warrior bronze. In his mind, the Silk Road and Route 66 are not so different as one might think.

"Route 66 was emblematic of the true Wild West, when land was a commodity and buildings were PR and a car was your friend," he explains. "A similar kind of commercial dance occurred along the Silk Road, and for strikingly similar reasons."

It is this kind of inclusive, synergistic vision that sets Antoine Predock's work apart from that of his contemporaries. It's not that he is smarter than other architects, or necessarily more talented, but that he throws a much wider cultural and philosophical net. He responds to the ancient murmurings of the land, as well as the contemporary static of freeways, trailer parks and strip malls. Nothing is taken for granted.

He once said that he'd just as soon talk about UFOs as Palladio. He was joking – but not completely.

E-mail ddillon@dallasnews.com