Albuquerque Architects Forge a Modernist Path
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Christopher Mead lives in a home designed by one internationally known architect based in Albuquerque. He has an office in a building designed by another.
As dean of the School of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico, Mead is in a unique position to evaluate the work of two of the region’s living treasures – architects Bart Prince and Antoine Predock.
“Bart’s architecture is so much the experience of being in the building and moving through the building,” Mead says. “Antoine is really interested in how to represent the world around us.”
Both do residential and commercial work, though Prince is best known for unusual contemporary homes, including many in the region, and approaches each site as a problem to be solved. Mead’s home, for example, is on a long, narrow lot and floats above the land like a fish, or even a ship. Predock, who received the coveted American Institute of Architects Gold Medal for 2006, takes on large projects – the $285 million ballpark for the San Diego Padres, the National Place Museum in Taiwan, the Tacoma Art Museum and Austin City Hall. Locally, he also is the architect behind the 78,000-square-foot town center at Mesa del Sol, which broke ground in January 2007. The $11 million building is scheduled for occupancy in October 2008.
Mesa del Sol struggled to find the right architect for the massive development, a “new urbanism project” that will cover 20 square miles of land, include 37,500 homes and 18 million square feet of office, industrial and retail space.
Chris Anderson, director of commercial development, was familiar with Predock’s work and approached him. What emerged was a striking design with a huge, curved exterior that incorporates the pattern of bones Predock found while walking the site.
“He saw the building rising like an artifact out of the desert, like it was always there,” Anderson says. “The stucco color is a bone color, and he spent a lot of time on getting the color just right.”
Predock is not a native, through he did get his architecture degree from UNM. He worked in New York and then San Francisco, but the openness of New Mexico drew him back.
“You come here and the landscape here is so incredibly powerful, so beautiful and sublime, the air is so dry to you can see 100 miles,” Mead says. “He responded very powerfully to that landscape. He has made a career trying to translate what that landscape looks like into architecture.”
This vision is apparent in the UNM’s new architecture school, which opened in January 2008. The façade along Central Avenue, for example, is like a great mountain with a canyon split through it.
“It is meditation on mountains and mesas and canyons,” Mead says.
Creators such as Predock and Prince have thrived in Albuquerque.
For Prince, the site and the client determine the solution. His ideas gestate and when he’s ready, he knows. “I work from the inside out,” Prince says. “People always say to me, ‘Is there something that you always wanted to do?’”
“I say, ‘The next thing I do.’”
That individualistic approach firmly puts Prince in an American architectural tradition dating to the mid-19th century that includes Frank Lloyd Wright, Mead says.
“This is a place you can do things and experiment. You can do things differently,” Mead says. “This is a place that is not going to put you into a box.”
Story by Pamela Coyle
Photo by Brian McCord
