Fierce Architects Home From Hot Climates

I've never heard of a Nobel Prize for architecture, but the closest equivalent I imagine would be the Gold Medal presented by the AIA and the AAF. This weekend, the National Building Museum hosted festivities to celebrate the recipient of this year's award, Antoine Predock. His name will join the list of past award winners, including Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. But Predock is not the stereotypical Architect, hunched over his desk, fighting off the encircling world with his Mayline and charcoal fingers (not that Corb was grumpy, though he was nuts). Rather than a Howard Roark, Predock seems far removed from the Ayn Rand model, instead projecting an image much closer to a typical Tom Robbins protagonist, with the 1951 Vincent Black Shadow and Shao-Lin street cred to back it up.

Attending his lecture this past Saturday was quite a trip. Predock was asked to talk about himself and his work, which, like a good architect, he did at great length. Rather than tedium or self-indulgence, the man's wily character and enthusiasm peddled a collaborative experience in what he called "the ride" of every project. He described his buildings in terms of form and mass, light, and the completion or integration of a building within its particular location. His work spans a dramatic range in scale, from single-family residences to enormous Chinese cultural centers, digging into mounds, completing ridge lines, and building mountains made of jade.Not to bore us with discussion of the functionality or programmatic devices of his work, which must be so succesful as to be transparent, Predock preferred describing the sun, the bedrock, and the mist as if they were members of his charrette team. Not surprisingly, he declared clay to be his primary drawing medium.

Predock is a pretty funny dude. Emboldened by the award, he said he felt that he was just getting started again. Saturday sounded like he was just getting warmed up (he's 69). Referring to his effort to exist culturally untethered, he says, "I like to fish in the Pacific because there are fewer Euro-centric fish than in the Atlantic". When asked how DC can reignite "exciting architecture" in the City, he suggested hiring him. On the spot he proposed a new structure for the mammoth hall of the Building Museum, a building within a building. "It will be a submarine... in an ocean of air." But still, his work was sweet, and his presentation drawings, in the words of Burt Dickson, the Judge Dredd of all things sublime, "awesome." Check him out.

AIA Gold Medal Winners, 2006 & 2046.