The annoying staccato rhythm
emanating from the telephone brought me out of a panic driven daydream. I don’t
know how long the handset had been locked in the vise-grip of my left hand. I
don’t know how long I had been blankly staring at the wall in my office. All I
knew was that Antoine Predock, FAIA, was
coming to town and I had been invited to accompany him all day. Never mind the
office, never mind the deadlines, never mind the anxiety. This was a very, very
good thing.
Now somewhere between the realm
of idolatry and obsession lies sincere, unabated hero worship. I had revered
Predock’s work from afar since he first visited Clemson University while I was
a graduate student twelve years ago. Since that time, he has escaped his
southwestern regionalist moniker and was
now competing for work on a world-wide scale against the likes of Gehry, Pelli,
Stern and Mayne. To be granted a semi-private conversation with the great
American Architects, past or present, is either the stuff of dreams or hirings
and firings. But unlike Frank Lloyd
Wright and his Taliesin apprentices, I did not have to pay “tuition” to obtain
an audience with this talented architect. This “joyride” was actually a very
fortuitous byproduct of the Kids in Architecture Program.
The Kids in Architecture program
was developed as a themed program for elementary schools to rival the
attraction (no pun intended) of magnet schools. Summit Drive Elementary School
in Greenville, SC has adopted architecture as its school-wide theme. Designed
to serve as the central “hub” with other elementary schools in the area serving
as the “spokes, ” these first through fifth graders are regularly exposed to
architectural related topics such as shapes, materials and buildings. Clay
Gandy AIA, an architect with Batson Architects, has developed a partnering
association between Clemson University’s School of Architecture, the South
Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities and Summit Drive
Elementary. Mr. Gandy’s resourcefulness, adamant persistence and AIA Greenville
sponsorships have created today’s scenario, bringing Antoine Predock from New
Mexico to South Carolina.
His resume speaks volumes about
his academic credentials. He received a Bachelor of Architecture from Columbia
University in 1962, won the Rome Prize in 1985, became a Fellow of the American
Institute of Architects in 1981, a visiting critic at SCI-ARC and Harvard and
was the first Robert Mills Distinguished Professor at Clemson University in
1995.
Until his meteoric rise to
national prominence in the late 1980’s, he may have been the southwest’s
best-kept secret, but he was hardly the overnight success that some might
believe. Predock opened his own practice in Albuquerque in 1967, and has been
winning local, state or national AIA awards since 1970. He has been in the
Record Houses issue of Architectural Record seven times since 1970 and over 45
books on architecture have featured his work. He has also been featured in 35
articles in Architectural Record since 1970 as well as 25 articles in the now
defunct Progressive Architecture between 1974 and 1995.
The more I thought about it, the
more difficult it was to not become intimidated. What should I ask him? Should
I speak to Predock the designer, or Predock the philosopher? No, I’ll start with the basics. Besides, I
was not going to try to pretend to be an architectural critic. This author had
no sycophantic intentions, just sincere admiration for Predock’s work. His
concept of the "roadcut," the summation of the intangible qualities
of place that are explored through a multi-disciplinary investigation of the
literature, art, culture, geology and history of the site are very intriguing as
a programming or research tool. I am a fellow practitioner and would like to
better understand the elements of Antoine Predock’s “roadcut.” So I decided to start at the beginning.
Predock opened his studio in
Albuquerque in 1967, followed by a second studio in Los Angeles in 1988. It was
refreshing to find, in his first book by Rizzoli, he had given recognition, by
name, to his employees over the previous 30 years. This selfless act documents
his ability to recognize the talents of the collective, acknowledging that he
has worked with “a lot of gifted and talented people.”
This reliance on good people may
be one of the keys to his strength as an architectural powerhouse. His time is
now split evenly between Los Angeles, Albuquerque and the airlines. He had come
to the upstate, leaving his office during a rigorous charette for a new design
competition. Never out of touch with his staff for more than two hours at any
given time, regular phone calls were made throughout the day to check the
design progress. Losing a design competition is something he takes to heart.
Although Predock regularly makes short lists for architect selection, he is
careful not to staff up just for one project. He instead prefers to form
associations with firms for additional manpower when needed.
The influences of Louis Kahn,
Frank Lloyd Wright and Jose Luis Sert on Predock’s career are well documented,
however one cannot help acknowledge the corresponding reverence for light and
shadow in his work and that of Tadao Ando. “He is an architect that I totally
admire. One day I was in Albuquerque. My house is next to my studio. I was told
there was a Japanese architect that was at my office and wanted to visit…..No
one had called or anything, they just showed up. So I said Oh, OK…and it was
Tadao Ando! So he and I became friends.”
One surprise revelation was in
discovering a “non-influence.” It seemed too obvious, in light of Predock’s
celebration of earth and sky, that he would have been a long time patron of the
writings of Martin Heidegger and the fourfold (earth and sky, divinities and
mortals). Not so. “Did you see my book
by Academy editions, by Geoffrey Baker?” replied Predock when quizzed.
“Geoffrey Baker was a Heideggerian, and he made this Heideggerian extrapolation
to my work. I had never studied
Heidegger at all. Through Baker I got the message of the fourfold. I kind of
buy into his interpretations but I never, never would have done anything conscious
because I didn’t know that much about him. Pretty fascinating because a lot of
it is dead-on.”
Resisting the temptation to
retreat to Chris Farley style questioning (e.g., Do you remember that time when
you designed that building…. that was great….), there was an unanswered issue
that had been addressed when I first met Predock 12 years earlier at Clemson
University. Since by trade and education, architects are party to the highbrow
or elite culture, and yet Predock had masterfully designed buildings that were
either part of or respectful to popular culture. He has even been known to cite
references to the writings of Marshall McLuhan.
Can this duality be an undeniable struggle on a philosophical
battlefield?
“One difficulty is the
temporality of the populist….. but it is the strength of the architecture that
I want to tap into. The ephemeral interests me very much but at the same time
the architecture I create has a deeper mandate. That is why I like to talk
about the highway roadcut. John McPhee the author from Princeton, understood
this cultural stratigraphy. You look at a highway roadcut, the pre-Cambrian
granite and the sedimentary strata in relation to the cultural episode, which
is just a thin film, it’s nothing. So what I can’t stand is when someone says,
‘why can’t your building look like the building next door’, well so what? It’s
just a temporary thing. I like to look at that deep thing, that power, rather
than a mental style. It is just an obsession with me, I am really interested in
the underpinning. I am a movie
freak. I love weird things that are
happening in neighborhoods. I let the cultural thing come through. It’s not
like I prioritize it, but it’s there.”
“The Santa Fe Hotel was an
internal struggle since I was working with Disney. They typically just want to
give people one-liners but I wanted to investigate something deeper. Look at
(the 1984 film) Paris Texas or any of Wim Wender’s work. That is a way of
seeing the west and Michael Eisner let me explore it with the Santa Fe hotel (Hotel
Santa Fe Euro Disney, Paris, 1992).”
His popular culture interests
are about as varied as his building types. Although a quasi-celebrity himself,
he is unable to hide the excitement in discussing the 1998 film Gattaca. Not
just because his Classroom/Laboratory/Administration Building at Cal Poly in Pomona California, shared the
silver screen with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center in this
science fiction thriller, but that screen siren UmaThurman was “cruising
around” his building. He gets equally
enthusiastic upon learning of the presence of the cable channel Speed-vision
for the opportunity to view re-runs of the black and white documentary based on
Hunter S. Thompson's 1966 non-fiction novel,
Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.
This affinity with cinema is not
to suggest Predock has “gone Hollywood.” Not in the least. He did open a studio
in Los Angeles in 1988, which he maintains with a staff of four. One of his
first projects out of that office was the Venice House. Initially unassuming in
program, this 30’ x 90’ shotgun house is one of three of his projects featured
in the Whitney Guide to 20th Century American Architecture,
as well as gracing THE book jacket in living color. The house is located,
literally, at ground zero of the “cultural zoo” of Venice Beach, California.
But rather than succumb to the all too common gravitational pull towards hipness, Predock chose to design a
structure that was timeless.
Predock reminisces: “…. I got to live in it for a month as part
of the contract. Now, here is this huge red 13’ high pivot window……I opened it
one Sunday morning, and there were these rubberneckers out there always looking
in and they applauded! It was like the
act of opening a window was theater….. Eric Saarinen, (Finnish architect Eliel
Saarinen’s grandson and Eero Saarinen’s son)
lives there now with his wife ……it’s in good hands.”
His intensity can be daunting. A snapshot of the day’s events that
best expresses this quality shows Predock in the front passenger seat of a
sedan traveling 70 mph towards Clemson University, furiously rearranging two
carousels of slides, simultaneously, while eating a sandwich and carrying on a
conversation with Virginia Uldrick, President of the SC Governor’s School for
the Arts and Humanities.
But how does a visionary talent
such as this mystic man of New Mexico, who frequently espouses commentary such
as “Architecture is a fascinating journey toward the unexpected,” relate to the
rest of the architectural profession where ordinary individuals are busy drafting flashing details or
calculating egress width requirements ?
“I have been in the trenches, I
worked my way through school doing full projects as a junior….By myself……. I
mean it wasn’t anything huge, but I just had that ethic from the very
beginning.” Conversational tidbits throughout the day substantiate his claim.
He spoke of the “ancient” talent of rolling a Number 2 pencil in order to keep the point sharp while
drafting, the perils of ink blobs
falling out of a ruling pen attached to a beam compass or the frustrating
experience of shirt sleeve buttons being captured in a “spi-roll.” We even developed a bond by discovering our
mutual hatred for plastic lead on mylar and the awful smell of eradicator fluid
on sepias. Louis Batson AIA, a principal with Batson Architects, also helped
fuel the nostalgic moment as the two seasoned principals recanted tales of
T-squares, eraser powder bags, ruling pens and sandpaper pencil pointers.
He laughs about the fact, almost
self mockingly, that the last time he visited Clemson he did not know how to
turn a computer on. Losing his computer virginity only a month ago, he now
proudly flaunts cyber buzz words,
promotes his URL address (www.predock.com) and unabashedly pedals his
on-line wares (The Pantheon wrist watch, the Vincent Black Lightning Wall
Clock, and the soon to be released Stealth Cookie Jar) to the audiences at his three KIA
presentations throughout the day. He has even found the World Wide Web to be a
double edge sword for a self-proclaimed information junkie that devours
everything in sight. “ I am now cruising websites” he admits, “but I can’t tell
where the boundaries are…. I don’t know where to stop finding stuff
out.”
The computer generated
renderings of his Gateway Alumni Center at the
University of Minnesota are testimony that he has come to embrace the
machine as an asset to his practice for production, presentations and
competitions, but he has one major ax to grind: an unabashed aversion for
computer fonts that mimic hand lettering.
Faithful to his craft, study models, brush pen and pastels will always
be prevalent in his repertoire.
Perhaps it is the summary
essence of sensitive artist, talented craftsman, and cultural observer that is
the “roadcut” of Antoine Predock. A seven hour visit revealed how
multifariously complex his interests and personality can be. For example, he
does get disappointed when he does not win a competition. He is proud of the
work of his sons. He is eager to discuss his two grandchildren and “doggie” (of
which he has emblazoned on his website). He is amazed at the size of Palmetto
bugs (someone had mailed him one from Charleston.) His first question upon arriving at the newly
opened SC Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities was “what is the cost
per square foot?” He is a Stan Musial
bred but San Diego Padre born again baseball fan. He is humble. And perhaps the
most telling of all: He sacrificed a day away from his office during a design
charette in order to help the Kids in Architecture Program………..
