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"View Slideshow\n\nAlthough he first achieved prominence in the Southwest, architect Antoine Predock is one of a line of midwestern artists who include Frank Lloyd Wright and fellow Missourian Mark Twain. As a boy, however, he says that his midwestern hero was St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Stan Musial.\n\n\"I didn't know what architecture was except that I lived in a house. I don't even think that I knew the word for a long time. My dad funneled me into engineering because it was his background.\" Like many another American lad of the 1940s and 1950s, Predock says, \"I became a motor head pretty early on. I liked to work on projects: hot rod cars, building little radios, model airplanes, things like that.\"\n\n\"I didn't know about the great buildings of the world.\" Still, at 21 Predock was back at New Mexico, enrolled in his first architecture course.\n\nPredock learned shop skills from his father, but, he says, \"one of the things I think about as I've evolved as an architect is, Where do the poetic impulses come from?\" His answer: From his mother. \"She was a liberal arts college graduate. She read me poetry when I was so young that it's amazing that I would even remember. I think I was three or four. It took me a long time to realize how valuable that was and what a mark it left on me. I never got that from my dad. He was pragmatic, a Mr. Fix-It kind of guy.\"\n\nAfter high school, Predock says, he wanted to go to college far away from St. Louis, and, having already spent time in the Southwest with an aunt and uncle, he enrolled in the school of engineering at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. \"I made good grades, but it was completely unfulfilling. I was more interested in the college life than in being an impassioned engineer.\" In the summers, he worked in the aircraft industry, \"on the McDonnell F4 and the B-58. I was an engineering flunky, a student doing rudimentary calculations. It wasn't like I was designing or anything, but I loved being in those environments.\"\n\nIt was at that point that he underwent one of those teacher-pupil moments that launch careers. Don Schlegel, a professor from the architecture school, was sent over to engineering to teach a technical-drawing course. \"There was just some kind of aura around this guy,\" Predock recalls, \"his demeanor, his presence, his love for what he did.\"\n\nThe experience apparently unhinged him, because he left Albuquerque for a time. He knew he didn't want to go back to engineering. Still, he remembers, \"I didn't know what architecture was; I didn't know about the great buildings of the world.\" Nevertheless, inspired by his experience with Schlegel, at 21 he was back at New Mexico, enrolled in his first architecture course.\n\nPredock has been on the map ever since, culminating in his being given the AIA's 2006 Gold Medal, the same award presented to Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn, the two figures in the field he admires most.\n\nPredock took to this new direction in his life so completely that, he says, \"I even went to Taliesin West to consider going there. I drove my old Plymouth over, and when I walked in, there was Wright standing there. He was so gracious\u2014he shook my hand and welcomed me.\"\n\nNot long after his encounter with this giant of world architecture, Schlegel, now Predock's mentor at the University of New Mexico, told him that the school had nothing more to offer him and advised him to apply elsewhere. So Predock found himself in New York City for the first time to attend Columbia University.\n\nAt Columbia, where he finished his architecture degree, he was awarded a fellowship for a year of study in Spain. From there he traveled to Genoa, where he bought himself a Lambretta motor scooter and set out to roam Europe, inhaling the art and architecture of the mother civilization on 50 cents a day.\n\nBack in New York, the young Predock got hit by another bolt from the blue. \"I was at a friend's crash pad in Manhattan on my way up to Harvard. I was lying on a couch, and this song came on the radio, and it changed my life. It was A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall' by Bob Dylan.\"\n\nToday, some 40 years later, a much older Predock still believes that the song \"awakened some inner social consciousness. I thought it was the most amazing, poetic, strange sound, everything about it. It was enigmatic and an assault in a weird, Woody Guthrie kind of way. It was a big landmark for me.\"\n\nLife, Predock believes, \"is a series of linked destinies.\" It was one such destiny that brought him his first commission and went a long way toward establishing him in his practice. As the architect tells the story, \"A guy I hung around with who was sort of a painter knew a guy with some money. They were both looking for a piece of land to do a new project on, and I got in on that. I quit a job, a really good job I had where I was a principal designer on major projects like the UNM law school. I just dropped everything and took a flier with these guys.\"\n\nThe architect describes the La Luz community on the Rio Grande in Albuquerque as a \"modern town house project that would link the buildings to preserve open space. I called it ecological design\u2014it's what you needed to do in the desert. You needed to respond to the wind and sun and protect the floodplains. It was a landscape in itself. That project put me on the map.\"\n\nAntoine Predock has been on the map ever since, culminating last winter in his being given the 2006 Gold Medal by the American Institute of Architects the same award presented to Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn, the two figures in the field he admires most. Like Wright before him, he is no longer a regional architect. \"I work all around the world, so I don't talk about the Southwest that much anymore,\" says Predock, who now has an office in Taipei and is even studying Mandarin.\n\nStill, he acknowledges his debt to the Southwest, where, he has written, he learned about \"responding to the forces of a place\"\u2014lessons that \"can be implemented anywhere.\" Speaking with the appreciation of a landscape architect, which he also is, he adds, \"The prime communities of the Southwest are survival communities. Their sustenance is governed by rainfall and wind direction. You can study little enclaves of plant materials, how they huddle together for protection. Some are nurse crops. The legendary tumbleweed is really a nurse crop that protects the growth of prairie grasses under its shade, and then it sacrifices itself and blows away.\"\n\nThese days he is working on The Inn at The French Laundry (a project in collaboration with his son Hadrian, who is an architect), to be built adjacent to Thomas Keller's famed Napa Valley restaurant, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. His wife, sculptor Constance DeJong, is another collaborator. As for the future, when asked what else he would like to undertake, Antoine Predock confides, \"I'd love to do something in New York City. But I don't think, Well, there's some dream project floating in a bubble over my head.\" He pauses. \"I just move, move with the territory that falls in my lap.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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