ANTOINE PREDOCK ARCHITECT PC

Drawing for me, is both a vehicle for understanding and a gestural act unto itself. Recording an experience via drawing embodies much more than an analytical intention. In fact, my drawings aren't very analytical. When I draw historic buildings, they are inacurate in many ways. My drawings are close, but they aren't about detail or proportion. They are about the spirit of a building or a place, and the spirit embedded in the encounter and its translation. Drawing is a way of taking on a place, absorbing it, immersing myself in it.

While making my early drawings, during the 1960s in particular, I was traveling on my motorcycle with only the bare essentials. I carried only a sketchbook and India Ink, and used objects I found on the site as drawing tools - bird feathers or twigs or popsicle sticks that I sharpened with a knife. Whatever was there, I drew with. An important part of the encounter was acutally finding these artifacts and drawing with them. Later, I added a tiny watercolor kit. I didn't start making brush drawings with pastel until I discovered the brush pen, which is easy to travel with because it involves no clean-up.

I see the making of architecture and traveling as one interwoven experice. Assimilating different places, observing the atmospheres in different locales in the world, both real and imagined, are all journeys. These assimilations and observations accumulate and comprise the foreground for making architecture- begining while I was a student and continuing now.

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 remains rooted in the earth with a geological and cultural past. The lessons I've learned here about responding to the forces of a place can be implemented anywhere. I don't have to invent a new methodology for new contexts. It is as if New Mexico has already prepared me.

In Australian Aboriginal dream time, songlines traverse the land and describe the geography in a way that is totally rational and yet mystically poetic. Similarly, the elemental power of this place is inescapable. In the making of architecture here, one has no choice but to deal with the basics of wind direction, movement of the sun, and other natural phenomena.