Word: predock
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...larger world is beginning to recognize Predock's gifts. Last year he received an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects, and he is busy now on six large-scale public commissions, four of them the result of world-class competitions. "Almost all my new work is outside New Mexico," Predock says. "I fly so much now, I scale my drawings for airplane tray tables...
Stylistically, however, Predock has been militantly Southwestern. La Luz, his clustered adobe housing development built 21 years ago in Albuquerque, was a precocious masterpiece that reinvigorated overused Indian forms. The 1985 Robinson-Burney House not far away could be a prototype for Southwestern family dwellings: a "ranch house" worthy of the name...
Among the best of Predock's work is the 1985 Tesuque House, built on a desert ridge overlooking the gorgeous desolation north of Santa Fe. The house, like all his finest designs, is not a monolith but a suggestive collection of smaller pieces, here a kind of lyrical single-family mountain village consisting of separate stucco boxes for living room, guest room, master bedroom and kitchen. The forms are stark, but Predock's scheme -- a casual zigzag arrangement that follows the terrain, roof lines that vary from flat to peaked to pyramidal, a restrained polychrome palette -- mitigates austerity. Gravitas without...
...Predock's own favorite residential work is the Fuller House, a more dramatic faux village finished two years ago in the high Sonoran Desert near Phoenix. It is more determinedly "spiritual," portentous, even sci-fi. "I like haunted, charged spaces," Predock explains. Inside is a polished black granite fountain from which water runs in a narrow, razor-straight canal outdoors, across a plaza and into a circular pool. There is a pavilion for watching sunrises at the east end, another for staring at sunsets in the west. The study is a stepped pyramid of volcanic stone, topped with a skylight...
Because his early interior plans are plotted out in extraordinary detail, Predock wins over big institutional clients despite his New Age enthusiasms. When he presented his design for a $24 million California State Polytechnic University Pomona project to the competition jury, for instance, he included floor-by-floor maps of the buildings' interior ambience -- a singular synthesis of engineering and intuition. On a low-rise roof at Pomona, he wants to plant grass and graze sheep. "They think I'm kidding," says Predock. He is smiling, but he isn't kidding...