Word: predock
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Dates: during 1988-1988
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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...
...Predock says he talks about UFOs and "magic lines of power" mainly "to disorient myself and my colleagues so new thoughts can enter into the soup." He is open to a wider, wilder array of ideas than any of his successful peers. Predock's great accomplishment lies not just in deeply absorbing eclectic influences ranging from Italian hill towns to science-fiction movies, but also in rarely letting one idea overwhelm the rest. And his sensible, good old Americanism, counterbalances his spacier side. On old Route 66 at Albuquerque's southwest edge is the Beach, a Navajo-blanket-pattern...
...Predock building is strikingly different from the next. In La Jolla, Calif., his university theater is to have a 27-ft.-high mirror appended to the front. And a western-memorabilia museum at the University of Wyoming will be a stone cone, suggesting a Teton or a tepee. His lack of a signature style is born of a faith in the uniqueness of each project. Predock believes that if he contemplates the client's requirements and experiences the site intensely enough, the right building will emerge. "This is an adventure," he explained to a couple who asked him to design...