Predock Studio’s George Pearl Hall, the School of Architecture and Planning at Antoine’s alma mater the University of New Mexico, is a device for both learning and levitation. As Predock himself wrote of the vernacular architecture that he contemporized in Pearl Hall, it “acts as a bridge between earth and sky.” Despite its muscularity, rectilinear form and industrial materials, the building shows students how form and materiality can be both celebrated and transcended via a complex weave of void and form, spaces and volumes.
Hung from four 90-foot-long steel trusses, also supporting the top floor Fine Art’s Library, the central studio floats over a sunken courtyard, while exposed structural, mechanical and electrical systems create a living architecture lab. As much an ode to the landscape surrounding the City as it is to the urban nature of the campus, Predock likened the building’s earth-tinted concrete wall overlooking Central Avenue to the cliffs of Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, as well as to “the mute, powerful walls of Anasazi architecture” seen at Chaco.
The massive 4-foot-thick poured concrete wall – very much a Predockian landscape in drag – offers a choreography of solidity and transparency as it opens up to a sun controlled louvered glass wall, set back to illuminate the inner courtyard. Indeed, light itself is a building material as solar apertures align with equinox and solstice dates. At once a grand escarpment and part of route 66, the building channels the vastness of the desert and the pulse of the city into a single, hovering form.
