Architecture of the Land presents the work of An­toine Pre­dock, the Ame­ri­can ar­chi­tect who has reinter­pre­ted the empty spaces of the de­sert land­scape, the ma­te­ri­als of the ter­rain, the forms of the tra­di­tion and the he­ri­tage of the cul­ture. To the pla­cid, sober, co­lou­rist style which com­bi­nes the tenets of the mo­dern mo­ve­ment with the vi­sual im­pact of the ver­na­cu­lar ar­chi­tec­ture of the South of the United Sta­tes, Pre­dock has added tech­no­logy, con­tem­por­an­eity and scale to con­struct new ar­chi­tec­tu­ral land­marks. Projects such as the Mu­seum of Sci­ence and In­dus­try in Tampa (Flo­rida), the Ari­zona Sci­ence Cen­ter and the Turtle Creek house in Dal­las, among others, bring to­ge­ther the pu­blic and the pri­vate, a tra­di­tion de­eply roo­ted in the land and the land­scape of New Me­xico and the avant-garde cha­rac­ter of the most ad­van­ced con­struc­tion tech­ni­ques.
Creator of evo­ca­tive forms and aus­tere de­signs of enor­mous vi­sual im­pact, Pre­dock ar­gues that his ar­chi­tec­ture be­longs as much to the land as to his own ideas: »When I set to work, du­ring my first con­fron­ta­tion with the land­scape, with the me­mory of the place, I try to ima­gine a slice, a per­fect sec­tion, through the ground I have to build on. A lot more than geo­logy ap­pears then. Ap­pa­r­ently in­vi­si­ble his­to­ri­cal tra­ces ap­pear which, for all that, are ac­tually de­fi­ning the place. I con­sider all data re­le­vant. I've try to build buil­dings that might one day form a new land­scape, that in­ter­vene in the en­vi­ron­ment and create new spaces. So­me­ti­mes I've at­temp­ted to con­dense all that I was see­ing, I've tried to make and ab­strac­tion of the sur­roun­dings land­scape, which on may oc­ca­si­ons was the moun­ta­ins or the de­sert.«
»What hap­pens with huge mo­dern buil­dings is that they have a enor­mous po­ten­tial which sets them apart from all theo­re­ti­cal re­a­so­n­ing. Ar­chi­tec­tu­ral theo­ries are far from sa­tis­fac­tory when faced with enor­mous buil­dings. A great de­sign can only be ex­plai­ned ar­chi­tec­tu­rally. Such spaces have an in­de­scri­bable, tan­gi­ble and subtle qua­lity; they have strength. Faced with them, one has a fee­ling of im­mor­ta­lity. This sen­sa­tion is what dis­tin­gu­is­hes works of art from buil­dings that re­strict them­sel­ves to edi­fy­ing a doc­trine, to erec­ting a few ideas. Ar­chi­tec­ture has an emo­tio­nal side which, whi­che­ver way you look at it, elu­des all theory.«
The book presents six re­cently com­ple­ted projects by An­toine Pre­dock: the Mesa Pu­blic Li­brary (New Me­xico), the Spen­cer Thea­ter in Fort Stan­ton (New Me­xico), the Dance Stu­dio for the San Diego branch of the Uni­ver­sity of Ca­li­for­nia (La Jolla, Ca­li­for­nia), the Turtle Creek house in Dal­las (Texas), the Ari­zona Sci­ence Cen­ter in Pho­enix and the Mu­seum of Sci­ence (Tampa, Flo­rida). An in­ter­view with An­toine Pre­dock by Ana­txu Za­bal­be­as­coa com­ple­tes the mo­no­graph.