THE RISE OF THE DESERT RAT

MIRIAM HORN

Following twenty years of near obscurity, Antoine Predock—suddenly one of the most sought-after architects in the world— is making his star rivals nervous

Architecture

On the day of Antoine Predock's 1988 Disney interview, he walked into Michael Eisner's Bel-Air home with a huge roll of paper stuffed under his arm. It was a collage, produced with the help of four young architects in Predock's Albuquerque office. Since Eisner had suggested a Santa Fe theme for a hotel at Euro Disney, eighteen miles east of Paris, the architects had created a chaotic assemblage of images torn from visitors' guidebooks, postcards, and movie magazines. There were cacti and scorpions, native pueblos and satellite dishes, John Wayne's head turning into Devils Postpile, a half-eaten body preyed upon by vultures.

New York architect Peter Eisenman was just finishing his interview, so Predock cooled his heels in Eisner's dining room. Looking around at the walls hung with paintings, he realized there was no place to put his twenty-five-foot-long creation. Like its creator, it would fit no conventional frame.

He carried the collage into Eisner's backyard and pinned it up on the patio wall. Lawn chairs were hauled out onto the grass, and the group settled in to hear Predock's explanation, "The West is about trails," he said. "Vapor trails in the sky, Interstate 40, dirt roads leading to nowhere—all are trails of the imagination." He showed them the yellow line cutting right up the center of the collage. "This is the trail of infinite space, one of those trails that makes you want to follow it, wherever it goes. And here, at the end of it, is a spaceship, a U.F.O." Eisner, his whole body leaning forward in his chair, listened intently as Predock talked. "That's all great," he finally said. "But where is the architecture?"

Antoine Predock is the outlaw of American architecture. Where others in his profession are cool, urbane, cerebral, he is physical and intuitive, a whirling force of nature. He doesn't live at architecture's epicenter, New York, but at the age of fifty-five has spent the past thirty-seven years in the high desert of New Mexico. Nor has he ever met the Godfather, the man whose patronage has been critical to the launch of nearly every contemporary architectural star. Antoine Predock doesn't know Philip Johnson.

"I think of architecture as abstract landscape," he told Eisner. "It's kind of like landscape in drag." Picking up a pile of blocks that once belonged to Eisner's kids, Predock began to create for his audience an architectural mountain, piling up buildings to create stepped terraces, a ridgetop, steep-walled canyons. Trails for cars, Predock said, would climb the mountain, passing artifacts of the real and mythic West along the way: a hanging tree, a rusted car, a huge drive-in movie theater with an empty screen.

Eisner found the performance mesmerizing, and commissioned not only the $40 million Santa Fe Hotel, scheduled to open on April 12, but also a $125 million, thousand-room hotel and convention center for the future expansion of Orlando. That nicely rounded out a project list for Predock that includes four museums, a library, a civic center, two theaters, several private homes, and buildings on four different university campuses in California, altogether adding up to some $300 million. Though he inhabits a place far outside the power centers and prevailing styles, Predock is rapidly becoming one of the most successful architects in the world.

It is Monday morning in Albuquerque, and Predock has asked me to be at his house by eight. When I arrive, I find him squatting, a pillow between his knees and his back to the wall. An elasticized jump rope is pinned beneath his feet and he is tugging at it, working his shoulders up and down. "You should do this," he tells me. "It's great for your back." Tossing the rope aside, he leads me past his racing bike and Rollerblades into a room with a massage table and an odd-looking machine, which he climbs into, hooking his knees over a bar and flipping himself over. With his white curls falling toward the floor, he keeps talking in his soft, intense voice, about abdominal breathing and the alignment of the spine.

His house is one piece of a complex of buildings that serve as his primary studio; a couple of years ago, when his work in California took off, he opened a second, smaller studio near the Venice beach and rented a small "crash pad," as he calls it, nearby. From his kitchen and dining room in Albuquerque, he can look across the courtyard to where his young team, most in shorts or jeans, is trickling in. He squeezes organic orange juice for both of us, and gestures for me to help myself to an array of vitamins on the shelf.

"The diet, the exercise and meditation—it's all in the service of his architecture," says Christopher Calott, until recently a project designer in his firm. "His athleticism is a big part of his competitive edge. Architecture is like an endurance contest, with architects having to run around the country selling their wares, and then run around some more to supervise the work, and lecture. Antoine does more of that than anyone, and he never wears out."

The house is open and quiet, but like Predock's studio is filled with the raw material of his inspiration. On a comer table is his collection of kitsch: a plastic Statue of Liberty with a snowstorm pedestal, a tiny sombrero, a Wayne Newton button, a jacked-up toy pickup truck, a plastic pyramid with a coin-operated mummy inside. A lot of architects talk about pop culture these days, but Predock is its most enthusiastic consumer. All of it worms its way into his architecture. When he built his library and children's museum in Las Vegas, he cruised the Strip for inspiration, and ended up dressing the building with lights for the Vegas night.

On the plane to Phoenix the next morning, Predock is preparing a presentation for a new government center in Las Vegas. He has found us a row of seats at the back, with another row facing us, and he has his feet up, a sketch pad and brush-pen in his lap, and a box of pastels balanced on his shins. He works rapidly, laying ink on the page like a master calligrapher or a scribbling child, producing, as I look on, a thing startlingly beautiful. He has brought along a plastic tub of guacamole and a bag of chips, which he is scooping into his mouth between brushstrokes. He wipes his hands on his jeans before he smears the pastels across the page. He is, at this moment, perfectly content.

"Nature boy," Peter Eisenman calls him. "Antoine plays a game as a sort of noble savage, a shaman, a medicine man. He looks like that and he plays the role, talking about the life of rocks and stone and sand. He is a shaman, I think. But it is also a spin, everybody has a spin, and I guess maybe the cultural spin is changing his way."

There are archaic, sacred forms in his work, pyramids and soaring obelisks. But there is also neon, James Bond, and Bart Simpson's hair.

Predock was trained as a painter by Elaine de Kooning, among others, and studied dance with his ex-wife, Jennifer, who was in the Metropolitan Opera Ballet while he was an architecture student at Columbia. Traces of both disciplines remain evident in the way he works. He has great faith in the unself-conscious gesture, what he calls "the innocent mark." "I think I've drawn the Pantheon a thousand times," he says. "I wanted it to become like my signature, my handwriting. That's what I want it to feel like when I draw. That line, the cut in the clay, the spontaneous assemblage of materials on a board, that movement my hand makes becomes part of the building later."

Predock sited a house once by running up and down a ridge, spinning around at points of spectacular views or interesting geological formations, and then drawing a line through his footprints and transferring it to the page. "Most of us have lost our connection to the earth," says Michael Rotondi, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (sciARC), the current headquarters of design hip. "We've forgotten how to improvise, because we work everything, always, all out on paper. We've lived in our heads so long, we need to reintegrate the body and the mind. Antoine is the one architect right now offering us that inspiration."

While nearly all of his peers are descendants of European classicism, the Bauhaus, and the International Style, Predock's architectural bloodlines are deeply American, reaching back to Whitman's metaphysical raptures on the land, to Frank Lloyd Wright's acute responsiveness to place, to the pure monumentality of the mystical Louis Kahn. There is no Predock style. For each of his buildings, he returns to architecture's first principles: the bony structure, the massive stripped masonry wall, the ritual of procession and arrival, the retreat into the dark, cool cave. There are archaic, sacred forms in his work, stepped pyramids and soaring obelisks, ceremonial stairways and circular pools. But there is also titanium and neon, Wim Wenders and James Bond, Stealth bombers and even Bart Simpson's hair.

It is a white city in the sun, Predock's planned Disney hotel in Orlando, curling around the edges of water which spills from deep, churning pools into a broad, still bay. Out of the water, fragments of a building emerge: chunks of fallen concrete, jagged, broken columns. It is, says Predock, the lost city of Atlantis.

The idea of place has not been big in architecture these past several decades. Most modem buildings have been indifferent to their surroundings, simply shoving the landscape out of their way. "It's been so easy to have a universalist vocabulary," says Robert Venturi, who was awarded architecture's highest honor, the Pritzker prize, last year. "But Antoine is a genius at connecting with the place he is working in, and with great artistry. It is that quality, I think, that makes him world-class."

Predock begins each project with what he calls a "conceptual excavation" of a site, digging deep into its geological and cultural past. For Orlando, he was given the task of creating a Mediterranean city. "Rather than lean on motifs, like red tile roofs, I turned instead to myths of the Mediterranean cultures," he says. "It was a way to avoid overt nostalgic references, a way almost of tricking myself. I got interested in the idea of the labyrinth, and started reading Umberto Eco, Lawrence Durrell, Mary Renault. The whole team read The House of Asterion, by Borges, and then we diagramed it, listed the physical descriptions in the story, and began to extrapolate spaces from that.

"I thought about lots of stuff. The fragrance of jasmine, the snake goddess, the Minotaur. I like those James Bond movies where the islands are all caves. You know the ones, where the landscape opens up and a speedboat rushes in and the landscape closes on them from behind. I thought about scenes from Key Largo, about white linen suits and ceiling fans, tropical clothes blowing in the breeze, what the ceremony of arriving at a resort ought to be."

"It looks to me like the best work being done for Disney," says architectural historian and critic Charles Jencks. "Like Isozaki, he understands what Disney is doing without being too accommodating, so he doesn't end up being themed to death. Most of the new Disney buildings are one-liners. They can't be ambiguous for more than twenty seconds. But Predock manages to be both specific and allusive, to always suggest but never name."

Like all of Predock's buildings, Orlando will be, as he puts it, "a ride." The physical way in which Predock makes architecture results in buildings that are themselves extremely sensuous. He creates notches to peer through, cool hollows to hide in, narrow, twisting paths to explore. He uses the sound of water, the fragrance of herbs. At his Rio Grande Nature Center in Albuquerque, the entrance is an underground passage through a big metal culvert, which combines the mysterious allure of a tunnel with a great, thrumming sound when visiting children play it with a stick. His American Heritage Center and Art Museum at the University of Wyoming in Laramie is a volcano-like cone, approached through a ceremonial allee of topiary spruce and ascended on a long ramp. Sheathed in metal, the building will, like the peaks surrounding it, catch falling snow. "I want to ski it with my sons when it's finished," says Predock, who once managed a single turn on the roof of condos he designed in Taos. "The cone's asymmetrical, so it has beginner, intermediate, and expert terrain."

People use his buildings as playgrounds, romantic rendezvous, temples, stages. At the Nelson Fine Arts Center at Arizona State University in Tempe, Predock turned a pyramidal roof into two sets of bleachers. On the day we visit, lovers are basking in the sun. We sit to talk on long benches set against cool walls under a deep overhang. ("I was thinking of a baseball dugout," he says.) In an exterior corridor, splashed with lacy shadows by the metal grille overhead, a trumpet player lingers over scales, fooling with the resonant acoustics afforded by the concrete walls. For its opening three years ago, a composer actually set a piece of music on the building, scattering clusters of performers on its balconies, steps, loggias, and arcades. This is a building of great majesty, its flytower a soaring blade cutting into the sky. In plan, it is like an abstract sphinx. "We noticed it was starting to look like an animal, so we pushed it," says Predock. "We lengthened its paws, gave it a tail and a stinger, and nudged it, sending it crawling toward L.A."

Predock was bom in the Ozarks, in Lebanon, Missouri, and his Frenchsounding name is a legacy of his Quebecois ancestry. His youth was spent in St. Louis and at eighteen he moved to Albuquerque. In the years since, the desert has worked on him as it once worked on Georgia O'Keeffe, D. H. Lawrence, and Paul Strand. It is the desert that has formed him, converting him with its vast barren spaces, its transparent light, the pervasive presence of an intensely spiritual native culture.

Predock designed his first project, the La Luz housing development outside of Albuquerque, in 1967, when he was thirty years old. His peers still deem it a "precocious masterpiece." Made of adobe mixed from sand excavated onsite, the houses are an abstract mesa, or a Minimalist's riff on the pueblos of the area's indigenous peoples. That land, those people, were present in everything Predock did for most of the next twenty years. Working almost exclusively in New Mexico, he used his isolation to forge a unique approach to design. "Growing up the way he did," says Mack Scogin, chairman of the architecture department at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, "Antoine wasn't burdened with all the traditional baggage, the great history and European tradition that might have pointed him in a more narrow direction. His vision remained fresh. Everything is new for him, every time."

Until his late forties, Predock remained on the margins, considered a talented, if probably limited, "regionalist" architect. Living and working off every beaten path, he was not well positioned to capture the attention and patronage of those who were nurturing other architects' careers: developer Gerald D. Hines, Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully, New York Times critic Paul Goldberger, Canadian Centre for Architecture director Phyllis Lambert, and director of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities Kurt Forster.

But Predock's isolation ended abruptly in 1985, when, after a year spent as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, he returned home with no work and entered the competition that would prove the turning point in his career. The Nelson Fine Arts Center won him both the American Institute of Architects' National Honor Award and the 1989 Buenos Aires Bienal, and marked the beginning of a period of intense activity and mounting fame that doesn't seem likely to end anytime soon. His firm soon grew from four persons to thirtyone. After decades of near invisibility in print, he was suddenly everywhere, and ever since his work has appeared almost monthly, championed by such editors as Karen Stein at Architectural Record and John Morris Dixon at Progressive Architecture. "They've developed an appetite for the myth," says a New York writer, "and now compete assiduously to publish his buildings."

When, in 1986, Predock won two more national competitions, other laurels followed: Gianfranco Monacelli, president of Rizzoli, proposed a monograph, adding Predock to a roster that includes James Stirling, Richard Meier, Aldo Rossi, and Kevin Roche. Invitations arrived to lecture and teach at the Walker Art Center, SCI-ARC, and Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Maguire Thomas Partners, which has assumed Gerald D. Hines's mantle as the connoisseur among developers, commissioned Predock to design a building for a business park in Texas. And Disney's Michael Eisner, the most sought-after architectural client in the world, saw Predock's work and gave him a call.

Predock is flourishing in the hungriest of times. With development pretty much at a standstill, the huge corporate-design firms are bleeding. Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates has been the latest casualty. Since the middle of 1990, the firm has cut a third of its architects. In the course of the last two years, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has laid off a third of its employees worldwide. Both are now chasing commissions they wouldn't have touched a few years ago, the mediumsize institutional work that was formerly the property of the small, high-design firms. Those firms are not faring much better. Stanley Tigerman cut his staff from thirty to fourteen. Even Michael Graves is busy largely, he says, by virtue of his work in Japan. That action is something they would all like to get a piece of, which has made architect Arata Isozaki, "the Philip Johnson of Japan," the man to court.

Worse than the recession is architecture's deepening malaise. Though the little hats and faux columns of postmodernism continue to crop up in suburban shopping malls across the land, it long ago ceased to offer any inspiration to critics or students. Deconstructivism, too, is rapidly losing its short-lived cachet, having hardened too quickly into a mannered, spiky style. Both turn their back on contemporary culture, retreating into sentimental historicism or a nihilistic scowl.

Against that background, Predock seems a bracing tonic, an antidote to the pessimism and arcane rhetoric that have drained so much of the life out of architecture. "Antoine's work is hopeful," says New York architect Steven Holl, "unlike the backward-looking stuff that I think represents the profession's collective failure of nerve. He has successfully resisted the postmodern movement, which so many American architects sold out to. Frank Lloyd Wright is not literally evoked in his work, but is there in Antoine's spirit of irreverence toward the tastemaking culture, and reverence for things like light, space, landscape, site—dimensions lost in the copybook eclecticism that is so dominant in architecture today."

As the cultural wheel turns with the dawn of the presumably more sober nineties, the very unfashionable architectural values Predock pursued in near obscurity for two decades are all at once the height of chic. He was an environmentally sound architect, using passive heating and cooling technologies and indigenous natural materials, when such concerns were dismissed as vaguely sixties and quaint. Now "green design" has become one of the hot buzzwords in the business. Hip, too, in this era illdisposed to Eurocentrism and the heritage of "dead white men," is Predock's love of vernacular architectures and multicultural sources, and his relative indifference to the canonical traditions. What remains to be seen is whether Predock's new currency proves a benighted blessing. Though his lack of a signature style will make him a difficult hero to knock off, second-rate imitators will undoubtedly try. Like Mies or Michael Graves, he may end up judged by the shabby work of his successors.

Predock's success is more than a matter of the times' catching up with him. He himself is an intensely charismatic personality. With his boyish, small-town awkwardness and antic manner, he seduces clients, the people who work for him, and critics with equal ease. "He's a chameleon," says one of his staff. "He can read people and adapt himself.

I don't mean in a slutty way—he always does it with integrity. But clients are mesmerized by the way he talks about buildings. They may think he's a little weird, but they feel like they're in the presence of a real artist."

Well aware of the effect he has on people, Predock has astutely chosen not to domesticate himself for public consumption into something less strange. For all his otherworldliness, he is also enormously ambitious, relentlessly driven to see his vision realized. Though he has one associate—Geoff Beebe has been with him since the mid1970s—Predock's proprietary control remains absolute, a fact made clear in the very name of his firm. Where others call themselves Frank O. Gehry and Associates, or Eisenman, Architects, he is Antoine Predock, Architect. Period. He is present at every stage of a project, staying involved long past the point where other star architects check out, protecting a building through years of approvals and construction, ensuring that his authorship is complete. When I ask him if he would ever take on a partner, he hesitates. "Why would I want to do that?" I suggest it might afford him an opportunity to rest. "I don't want to rest. I want to keep doing this as long as I can. My work and my life are one."

Predock surrounds himself with smart, talented designers, who wander in and out at will and generate a sort of fertile chaos in every room. But Predock's obsessive perfectionism can be rough on the people who work for him. He is sometimes brittle, bristling when he is teased, and is often hypercritical over trivial things. When an employee puts slides wrong side down on a light table, he snaps at her. "Don't you know that these are supposed to go like this? Don't ever put slides down like that again." After a company weekend skiing trip, a sort of family camp-out in Predock's condo in Taos, I witness a baffling outburst over two bags of laundry that somehow failed to make it back to Albuquerque. "Antoine should be the design genius and let somebody else deal with the laundry," says one of his staff. "That's how other architects handle it. They get managers in to do the stabbing, so the principal can stay the good guy and let everybody hate the henchmen. Venturi, Pelli, Pedersen— they all got a partner who was good at marketing, a complement. But Antoine ends up doing stuff he's not good at, like managing people."

"He does have some of the personal hallmarks of 'the great architect,' " says Sylvia Lavin, a friend of Predock's and assistant professor of architectural history at U.C.L.A. "There's a bit of the Fountainhead syndrome in all of them. Antoine's relationship to architecture is all-consuming in a very Romantic sense. I can well understand that people around him might feel displaced or bruised."

Although he keeps his private life under heavy armor, Predock's manic devotion to architecture until recently seemed to be sabotaging his personal relationships as well. He is close to his sons, Hadrian, twenty-four, and Jason, twenty-two. And he has attracted a devoted circle of female admirers, many of them architecture writers and students, earning him a racy reputation among his peers. But those closer to him painted a very different picture, that of a man who had taken an almost religious vow to his work and so kept himself free of entanglements that might make competing claims.

But as Predock's professional horizons have broadened, so have his personal ones. Since last May he has been happily involved with Constance De Jong, a successful sculptor who teaches at the University of New Mexico. After so many peripatetic years, Predock now makes it back to Albuquerque at the end of most days. "Maybe we just don't want a more normal life,'' says De Jong. "We both have work to do, and I don't ever feel like I'm in competition with his architecture. There probably was a time when he was more interested in architecture than anything else, but he has achieved so much of what he worked for and, I think, now feels there is so much more in life to have. Though it's almost too bad I came into the picture," she laughs. "You could paint this mysterious, unattainable man, this wild horse no woman could tame. I'd hate to see you put him in the corral. ' '

Predock's reputation for ambition is in no danger with his peers. Michael Graves began to call him "Antoine Predator" after losing out to him on projects in Las Vegas and Los Alamos. "He's very competitive," says Graves. "And he pretty much owns that region. He'll tell a client that he's the only one who feels the sun and the sand. But I hope you'll convey that I have my tongue in my cheek when I'm saying that."

The rest of the Disneyites, as the other members in the Eisner stable are called, also get in their digs. They make fun of his thick-soled "space shoes" and have nicknamed him "Tony Corona," both for his corona of white hair and because they know he hates being called Tony. "I don't know how he does it," jokes one of them. "He's able to convince these clients that he's the Second Coming. I guess they go for that warmy, feely, touch-me jazz."

"They hate that he can get good jobs," says a New York architecture writer. "They liked it a lot better when he just stayed in Santa Fe, and they could be comfortably condescending." Now that nearly all of Predock's work is outside the desert Southwest, his rivals can only remain hopefully skeptical. "Antoine does not want to be seen as another Paolo Soleri. He knows you can play desert rat only so long," says Peter Eisenman. "But we will have to see what he makes of his dislocation to Los Angeles, to a cosmopolitan, urban career. It is the difference between playing hardball in the big leagues and summer league out in the desert."

This is a critical point in Predock's career. With his numerous projects in California and elsewhere, he is finally in a position to prove that he can in fact leave the desert rat behind, and make work equally rooted in radically different environs. So far, the evidence looks promising: his work in California is markedly different from his sunscorched, reticent southwestern buildings. One of his first projects was a black, mesh-covered lifeguard tower for the L.A. beaches, built of the tubing used in bicycle frames. "I called it 'the land shark,' " says Predock. "It was no more Mr. Adobe for me. But people complained that you couldn't flirt with the lifeguard. Personally, I think veils are sexy. And I figured you wouldn't have to wear sunglasses. You'd be sitting inside of a pair."

His greatest success so far outside the desert has been the Mandell Weiss Forum, a theater for the La Jolla Playhouse and U.C. San Diego. The theater opened last June with a world-premiere play by Lee Blessing, Fortinbras, staged by Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff, who brought Big River to Broadway. The theater ranks among Predock's finest works. Theatergoers approach the building through a grove of eucalyptus trees, crunching over fragrant leaves, often in a thick Pacific mist. Emerging into a clearing, they are confronted with a 272-foot-long mirror, 13 feet high, that reflects the silver trunks of the eucalyptus and the mist and the oncoming crowd. The mirror dematerializes the building, which seems to float like a ship or a whale. "It is about the ritual and ceremony of theater," says Predock. "It's to do with magic, to surrendering to an event. They see their collective and individual reflection there, as a sort of preparation for the profound change that may await them inside." To enter the theater, audience members step through the looking glass, climbing a steel ramp and walking out onto a balcony that seems to hang on glass, or on nothing at all. The theater itself, which McAnuff describes as "a perfect combination of a classical Greek amphitheater and the most hightech, flexible thrust stage I've ever worked on," is the bruised purple color of dried eucalyptus leaves.

What lies ahead for Predock may carry him even farther from his desert home. He is currently awaiting the King of Morocco's decision on a huge resort on the Atlantic coast, and has been talking to potential clients in South America. And, of course, there is always New York City. Though there is much skepticism that any New York developer, a generally conservative breed, would ever go for Predock, still the idea intrigues, and not long ago he was in fact short-listed to design the south transept of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. He is frequently asked whether he would like to do a Manhattan skyscraper, most recently after a lecture he gave to a packed house at New York's Architectural League. His answer to Columbia architecture professor Mary McLeod was, as always, Yes, a high rise in Manhattan would be nice. Well then, said the professor, would you orient it to the phases of the moon? "Could be," said Predock. "You just never know."