Antoine Predock Clay

Antoine Predock working on a clay model for the Student Activity and Recreation Center at Ohio State University en route, 2001

CLAY

When a project is formative or embryonic the drawings are often terse and immediate, a kind of encoding or DNA that will inform the making of the building. These preliminary or anticipatory drawings lead to three-dimensional clay models, which can be very tiny - three-by-five inches like Cal Poly, or very large, like the one for Agadir which is five feet long and three feet wide. I am still exploring as I work with the clay but I am working toward a finality. Compared to a drawing on paper the models are very real; they are the building. They are not 'massing models,' they rationally address section and plan.

In the case of my clay models, my team cuts out functional program bits in cardboard, to scale. They're abstract squares or rectangles and I test them against the clay forms as I'm assembling and shaping the clay. So I don't do an architectural concept sketch and see if the program has anything to do with it. It is embedded in the work from the very beginning and the discussions with clients with respect to the performance life of the building are very exciting and lead off into many interesting directions in terms of the programmatic intensities in the work. So the program figures continually with the different ingredients of energies that go into the first moves or gestures toward making the piece that becomes a building. The disclaimer with respect to the program would be that we know historically that buildings through the ages change their program and this ephemeral notion of program has to do with political overlays, cultural norms or evolutionary change in what was functional content. The Pantheon changes from a pagan temple to a Christian church overnight, so these kinds of tremendous reversals are also part of the possibility. This means that any building must have a life of its own, in a way independent of program, but of course accommodating the original program. So when architecture becomes solely program-driven and is merely a functional diagram, without other admixtures, it becomes a rather empty determined condition. Like a body without a soul.