For Antoine Predock, New Mexico wasn’t just a place—it’s, “a force,” he wrote in his treatise, “Desert Beginnings - Portable Regionalism.” Predock, an architect whose works dot the globe but were rooted in the American Southwest, died at 87 on March 2, 2024. He was born in Missouri and relocated to New Mexico as a college student, and the Southwest’s geography and climate played an ongoing role in his design practice. Since the founding of his firm in the late 1960s, Predock created work that connected to the high desert through its use of materials, light, and landscape.

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Predock’s earliest works in New Mexico and Arizona speak to site terrain: The Zuber House in Paradise Valley, Arizona, is composed of two wings that branch outward in opposing directions, creating a connection between the nearby Camelback Mountain and the city of Scottsdale. The house is perhaps best known for a stark photograph of its outdoor walkway shaded by a patterned screen that casts an elaborate shadow; it became an icon for Predock’s later use of light and shadow. In the desert, shade is a type of luxury while also presenting an opportunity for play.

The Venice House—a beach home in Venice, California, completed in 1991—appears as a set of minimalist concrete boxes that use large-scale operable windows to create doorways to the outdoors. Predock cut a slit in the home’s thick concrete wall, creating a small window that sheds a sliver of light inside the house. It’s these types of subtle gestures, coupled with raw materials and textures, that ground these projects in place. He wrote about using clay in model-making, a technique that, while tedious, seemed to lead to the discovery of a building’s “soul.”

In his later design work, Predock expanded beyond single-family residential architecture into civic, commercial, and educational buildings, including the Austin City Hall and its public plaza, where limestone, copper, and canopy screens come together in a terraced massing that looks like its own landscape.

These structures are, as Predock told the Young Architect podcast, embodiments of architectural practice, which he said is about, “linking episodic events, spatial events, that involve all the senses. Buildings aren’t one-liners… They’re not some seductive parametric thing that you cram stuff in to make them work… They are hard-fought processes that yield magic, if you’re lucky.”

Top image: Steve Northup/Getty Images

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Architect Antoine Predock Dies, Leaving a Legacy Inspired by the American Southwest