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Antoine Predock: America's 'Outlaw' Architect
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20597 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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10 / 1992 |
1,880 Words |
| Author
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Cynthis Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is senior contributing editor to THE WORLD & I
Arts section. |
There is a certain irony in Antoine Predock--an American architect proud that his basic approach to design is site-specific (i.e., expressing spirit of place)--getting the biggest publicity in his entire career for a hotel he created for Euro Disney, eighteen miles east of Paris.
Not that the stark hotel doesn't look as if it belonged on some desert road near Santa Fe, where he is accustomed to working, but the lush green countryside of France had to be factored out as Predock and his team sought to re-create a setting with which they were long familiar. The building, reminiscent of a lonely motel in the Southwest, was forced to undergo one slight modification at the request of Michael Eisner, head honcho of Disney. Predock had conceived of having a blank screen of a deserted drive-in theater loom up behind the roof of the motel, recalling how drive-ins have become ancient artifacts in America of today. The people at Disney, with a huge film company of their own, were not about to have any blank movie screens around. The result: a painting of Clint Eastwood as cowboy icon on the screen. The French love Predock's building--American critics have tended to find it a bit on the minimal.
Hot Practice
Predock has been called the outlaw of American architecture, although these days he is considered one of the hottest architects in the world. Unlike most of America's major architects, he doesn't live or practice out of New York City. Now fifty-five, he has lived in the high desert of New Mexico since he was eighteen, although he did study architecture at Columbia. It was in his brief New York years that he also trained as an artist with Elaine de Kooning and studied dance with a former wife, a member of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet.
Unlike many of his architectural peers, Predock's roots are solidly anchored in things American. He is closer to Frank Lloyd Wright in his responsiveness to place than to any tradition of the Bauhaus. There is no special Predock style, but in each of his works there is a return to certain basic qualities: a spare, spiny structure, a massive wall of masonry, entrances that invite inward to dark, cool areas calling up memories of ancient caves. Elements of the archaic and even scared--ziggurats and circular pools--are definitely reflected in his work.
New York architect Peter Eisenman calls Predock a "shaman, a medicine man…talking about the life of rocks and stone and sand." And indeed, rocks and stone and sand certainly
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