Design: An Architect for the New Age

Antoine Predock is just not like other major American architects. He looks like a gracefully aging tennis pro (tanned, fit, intense) and sometimes sounds like a Jungian therapist ("I get clients to explore their fantasies"). He lives in neither of the two U.S. Architect Belts (Boston-New York- Philadelphia, Los Angeles-San Diego), but in plain, out-of-the-way Albuquerque. His work is not strictly modernist or postmodernist, classical or avant-garde; the pigeonholes do not apply. Predock, a self-described "cosmic modernist" who senses the "emanations" of a particular building site and says only half jokingly that he "would rather talk about UFOs than Palladio," is nevertheless creating a remarkable body of work -- tough and sensual, fabulously imagined, altogether persuasive. He may be the first great New Age architect.

The 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 menace.

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. Yet for all the house's risky paradox -- B-movie imagery conceived with restraint and accomplished with first-rate production values -- it succeeds breathtakingly. Shirley MacLaine would be happy here, but so, maybe, would Mies van der Rohe.