Antoine Predock's bike, a 1951 Vincent Black Shadow. |
GHB: You spent time in Rome. Was that more recently, or was it at that time in your early education that you went to Rome?
AP: In the sixties, I rode a motorbike around Europe
- after Europe motorcycles seem to figure prominently in my life - from
Paris to Istanbul. I shipped it back to Naples, then rode up through Italy.
I visited Rome then. But Geoffrey, I think you're referring to my Rome
Prize Fellowship in the eighties. But there's a critical piece of experience
I want to throw in, between those two points in time. I was with a dancer
when I was a Columbia student. Jennifer Masley, who later became my wife,
was a dedicated young Julliard-trained dancer in the Corps de Ballet at
the Metropolitan Opera. I became very involved in dance through her inspiration,
and I guess, the body in space in general, and I think that has influenced
my work profoundly. We co-directed a dance company for a while and the
notions of motion in space combined with the assemblage of objects in
space led us to develop choreographic strategies. We would make a grid
and put dancers at points on the grid. Dancers would be told to move along
the grid until they encountered one another - this led to contact improvisational
crossroads. There was an aspect of indeterminacy in that the timing of
the encounters were random. These interests were related to work done
by Merce Cunningham and John Cage. At points on the grid, we made architectural
constructs. The reason for this deliberate control of the dancer's space
was because the merely emotive response seemed too easy. So we tried to
contrive a choreographic/architectural context that would guide the body
in space. I am always aware of the body moving through architecture -
the physicality of architecture. I've done athletic things, I've run in
the Boston Marathon and I've ski raced. I think of real architecture as
an adventure, extremely physical, certainly cerebral, but mostly informed
by spirit. in terms of the weighing factors, I would place architecture
more here [pointing to his heart] than here [pointing to his head], very
definitely, that place one points to when one thinks of his or her inner
place that operates independently of intellectual processes.
GHB: This is interesting, because I was going to ask
you about that, about the relationship in your work between the heart
and the mind, and particularly in the context of recent developments.
These stylistic movements have been going on for quite sometime now and
seem to some extent dependent on where the architect is living. If you
live in Europe, in one of the big cities, you go for High Tech maybe,
or Deconstruction and its offshoots, perhaps early Modern revival or even
Classical Revival. Living in Finland, Alvar Aalto was profoundly concerned
with the Finnish landscape and climate and the whole culture. There is
also a well-known California School. So where you spend your time, what
you enjoy, nurtures attitude and even stylistic evolution. Certainly in
the American Southwest, I can well imagine that the heart would be more
important than the intellect. I want to ask you how you feel about various
stylistic movements that have been developing, where sometimes it seems
as though it's perhaps the intellect more than the heart that produces
an architecture devoid of any sense of context.
AP: The heart and mind are of course part of a triad - a triad in which they play supporting roles to spirit. The infusion of post-structuralist thought into architectural theory, particularly at certain sites on the East Coast, has extended the interesting chicken or the egg polemic. Is there architecture without theory? Is there theory without architecture? Is architecture dependent on theory? Those debates are interesting to me peripherally. The Eurocentric bias that has been part of American architecture since the earliest eclectic stylistic manifestations is still there; the fascination with French literary critics and the like offers important and new insights into thinking about architecture. I guess that in New Mexico I have unconsciously protected myself against too much of that onslaught, simply because I'm out of that loop, out of that dialogue. Working here, you simply have to deal with wind direction, the movement of the sun and the iconic landscapes (mountains) in a built architecture; though I never exclude solely theoretical models when I define architecture. I don't think architecture necessarily has to be built to be critically important. In my case I do build, I've built many buildings and they are an obvious visceral response to this place at fundamental levels. If there were an all-pervasive theoretical or stylistic context here, like I remember on the East Coast where I have lived and studied and taught at different times, I'm not sure I would have escaped those omnipresent influences. In Santa Fe you have it, but in New Mexico, there is Santa Fe and there is Albuquerque, which is Wild West, and has no stylistic mould; it has little regional continuity. Little pockets, small enclaves might have a Pueblo drift but Albuquerque is just another Wild West city along Route 66. Great film-makers like Wim Wenders have seen beyond the 'cuteness' of the American Southwest to its core in movies like Paris, Texas.
Being in Albuquerque I feel like I'm globally connected because the airport's
ten minutes away, but I think I look more towards the Pacific than the
Atlantic in terms of fishing ground. For me, the Pacific is richer fishing
ground than the Atlantic, not dominated by all the Eurocentric fish. The
Pacific laps on the shores of Meso-America, of South America, the Indonesian
archipelago, Malaysia, Japan, the Oceanic cultures and all the others
hardly mentioned in architectural history courses. When I studied architectural
history, they were marginally noted, if at all, those fabulous cultures,
and there is no impetus to an architecture that was very different from
a rational European model; so I've tried to achieve a balance. But I very
much appreciate my time in Rome, particularly in the eighties with the
Rome Prize, and time to just surrender to the place over a length of time.
I did many drawings and made a video piece, and during that dangerous
time in architecture during the eighties I tried to come back without
any nostalgic Post Modern trappings as the residue, as the distillation
of my experience.
