"In my work, the connection to the sky is always there. I talk about going into the sky and into the earth simultaneously, and I often mean that quite literally."

"When I was a student at Columbia University I became very involved in dance and with the body in space through the work of Jennifer Masley, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainier and later, Anna Halprin. This influenced my work profoundly. I think of my buildings as processional events, as choreographic events; they are an accumulation of vantage points both perceptual and experiential. At the Mandell Weiss Forum, for example, one comes through a eucalyptus grove and there, in a clearing, out of the blue, stands a two hundred and seventy foot long mirror. One is suddenly part of the procession of arrival....It is a ritual — the encounter with this giant mirror, the collective straightening of the tie, and the passage through the looking glass to what lies beyond."

A R C H I T E C T U R E

Antoine Predock — Into the Earth to Sky

"New Mexico has formed my experience in an all pervasive sense. I don't think of New Mexico as a region. I think of it as a force that has entered my system, a force that is composed of many things. Here one is aimed toward the sky and at the same time rooted in the earth — with a geological and cultural past."

In his Notes at the beginning of his book, Antoine Predock, Architect,
Antoine speaks of the profound influence of the American Southwest:.

"Sometimes a building's connection to a place starts with a silhouette, the notion of silhouette. When we come west for the first time and try to get our bearings, there is a daunting confrontation — the limitless landscape, a limitless sky, distant mountain ranges iconically marking the land. I understand the tendency toward monumentality, ersatz monumentality when confronted by the onslaught of this infinite space. How does one go up against a mountain range? One option is to make something comfortable like a classical pediment, the impulse that has traditionally been followed in false-front western towns. Another option, one that I have chosen, is to make buildings that suggest an analogous landscape.

". . . The American Heritage Center in Wyoming, among other things, is an abstraction of land forms in the area, the mountain and the mesa. The building introduces an 'archival mountain' into the landscape, with a village, the art museum, at its base. The project also manifests cultural readings, a sense of rendezvous, that timeless quality of meeting on an open landscape that we can trace from Native Americans to French trappers to Anglo settlers. It is about the desire to mark the land iconically, to beckon across great spaces, and deliver on that invitation. It is about connections.

"From within, the building establishes a series of vantage points that track the sun and isolate views of particular moments, especially views west toward Medicine Bow Peak that are captured in the apertures of the west stairway. Other fragments of views almost deny the panoramic impulse of seizing the wide-angle view of the West so that one can encounter that very personally. I refer to the openings as apertures and not windows because an aperture has an obligation that a window doesn't have. It is not just about views and light, it is about magic, capturing, harnessing the power of a distant mark on the land and reinforcing that connection.

"The notions of invitation and connection are critical and occur on many levels. They occur from a plane flying into Laramie airport or from a car coming down the Interstate from Cheyenne. Approached in that way, the building also suggests an ancient helmet erupting from the prairie. its ambiguous evolving copper patina, inspired by the sculpture of Constance De Jong, reinforces that image.