Antoine Predock, 1936–2024

News of Predock's death comes to us via the Albuquerque Journal, which reported that, according to a family friend, he died over the weekend; they did not give a cause of death. As quoted in the piece, Predock told the Journal just last month that “New Mexico has been my spiritual home for 70 years and it is everything to me but I don’t like to be thought of as a local architect.” He further said that just a “tiny percentage of my buildings are around New Mexico. There are so many more all around this country and all around the world,” including the Nelson Fine Arts Center (1990) in Arizona and the American Heritage Center and Art Museum (1993) in Wyoming, and, more recently, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (2014) in Winnipeg, the Luxe Lake New Town Gateway (2014) in Chengdu, China, and the College for Journalism and Communication (2017) in Doha. As such, Predock had an office in Taipei, in addition to the office in Albuquerque. Projects on the boards and under construction are found, per Predock's website, in New Mexico and Costa Rica.

The oldest project listed on the architect's website is La Luz, a residential development in Albuquerque that Predock started working on in 1967, the same year he established his firm in the city. “A close-knit community of townhouses,” the website says, “creates intimate private realms while conserving open areas for common recreation.” The merits of the project, now known formally as La Luz del Oeste, particularly the way it incorporated the surrounding landscape into the development, earned it a spot in the National Register of Historic Places just last October.

Predock was born in Lebanon, Missouri, on June 24, 1936, and started his higher education at the University of Missouri in Columbia, but after one year there he shifted to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He followed that engineering degree with an architecture degree from Columbia University in New York City in 1962 and a traveling fellowship from Columbia upon graduation. Predock told me in 2018, after he gave the keynote talk at the Vectorworks Design Summit in Phoenix, that “the city was my laboratory more than Columbia.” So it made sense that, in 2017, instead of sending his archive to Columbia, he gifted it to the University of New Mexico, which created the Predock Center for Design and Research in the architect's former home and studio in downtown Albuquerque.

Predock's death at the age of 87 comes a month ahead of the release of his latest monograph — a “memoirograph” from Rizzoli charting 65 years of architecture and spanning nearly 700 pages with a whopping 3,500 photographs. Appropriately, given that the AIA Gold Medalist and recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the Cooper Hewitt is known as much for his love of motorcycles as for his talent as an architect, the Predock monograph to be released on April 23 is titled Ride.