Architecture can be intimidating. So was the size of the tome (a word we rarely use but it is seriously apropos for this title) that celebrates the built environments of Antoine Predock. Surveying 65 years of his visionary work, the 690-page retrospective, RIDE, can serve as a lesson for all firms: document your work and archive it continuously. Published by Rizzoli, the book is both a visual and an emotional feast for the senses; and Predock’s voice was as muscular as his buildings.

The architect opened the book with, “The beginning is an opening, an unexpected recognition that has worked its way through layers of habit—habits of thinking, habits of behavior and cultural expectation. That point of light is the beginning. And the most difficult thing for many is to recognize it and jump on it, take a ride on it. Subsequent development sometimes leads to the elaboration of a narrative, but half the time I simply make something I like. The narrative doesn’t rule. I don’t test every move against it. If it is there, it is open-ended, it is malleable, like the clay of the models that I make. I can change it or scrap it or reverse it. At the end you wonder what it was that started it all—what was the beginning, the so-called inspiration. It just seems to show up, as in Garcia Lorca’s notion of ‘duende.’”

The depth to Antoine Predock’s thinking shines through time after time. “When I’m at the Louvre, I beeline to the Mona Lisa; rather than look at it, I watch the behaviors associated with it,” he wrote. “And of course, the Mona Lisa is moving me, mystically and unconsciously, as I watch the performance. This aspect of performance has much to do with architecture. The cat’s nine lives that accrue around the process of making and experiencing a particular architecture are fundamental to it. But where is its deepest reality?” And, he so wisely said, “Architects are double agents in an ongoing balancing act, balancing inner and outer worlds. Much of the discussions that surround the making of a building are about ephemera. To ignore the ephemera is an abnegation of responsibility. But to ignore the inner world, to brush over content, and give ephemera priority leaves the essential power of architecture unexplored.”

In a section he called “Inner Life,” Antoine Predock described the initial spark he felt for the built world: “In the late 1950s, as an engineering student at the University of New Mexico, I was playing out my studies, successfully, albeit aimlessly—the only exciting part was summer jobs in the aircraft industry and becoming enamored of its technology and the exotica of jet aircraft materials. Then, by chance, or I should say, by destiny, I landed in an engineering drawing course taught by a young architect. Meeting him turned out to be a pivotal point in my life. Without any architectural proselytizing, he ignited some latent flame within me. He projected an enthusiasm that showed me that it was possible for work to be life, not merely a job. I switched to architecture, understanding through him that I had a previously unimagined mission. That encounter was with Don Schlegel. It reinforced my reliance on, and trust in, an inner truth—to be always true to an inner life. This has made all the difference in understanding the necessity even to walk away from uninspiring projects and to always choose the option of adventure. Architecture is a ride—an intellectual and physical ride—with the adrenalin of a roller coaster and the thrill of a motorcycle on the open road.”

Moving forward into his first decades, he wrote, “Twenty years into my practice, the Rome Prize allowed me to study as a Fellow at the American Academy, extracted from my everyday life and immersed in a new (old) world, amid the strata, where the man-made dissolves through time into a geological blur, where natural landscapes have had order imposed upon them that is subtle and extraordinary, and an ancient presence is always haunting. The deepest, most lasting thing I brought away was a vision of a kind of time travel. In Rome I found myself exposed, physically and conceptually, to the process of excavation. Ushered into the basement of an apartment building, I discovered the subterranean water of the Tiber flowing over gigantic stones with Latin inscriptions on them. It was the great Sundial Field of Augustus of which the gnomon, the sundial pointer, was an Egyptian obelisk, now in the Piazza Montecitorio. Shuffling through the accretions, I experienced the collapse of time and timelessness so vividly—like a sci-fi movie.

“This Roman blurring of geology, landscape, and building has had a profound effect on my approach to architecture and has propelled me to seek the spirit of those layers, to delve into and explore the accreted deep time of every site—even where not so obviously present as in Rome. This curiosity and desire to be immersed in the essence of site continues to be at the heart of my process. With a primitive video camera, I made a piece on Rome—nonstop, Andy Warhol/Blair Witchesque footage. Anywhere I’d go, I’d take my camera, pastels, and brush pen. I had a mixed-media, complete immersion experience. With daily practice drawing, I learned to trust in the innocence of an encounter and the translation of that encounter into an innocent mark. Capturing essences of this surreal landscape through pastel on paper and through time slices on video, I was able to grasp, within two dimensions, the truth of four dimensions.” We are barely scraping the surface of this fascinating look into the creative world of this incredible artist and we highly recommend the Antoine Predock book to anyone who reveres the built world.

The banner image is of the Gateway Arrival Building/Arts Center in Chengdu, China, by Antoine Predock. The editors of Design Diary received a free copy of this book, though this in no way influenced our opinions expressed here. You can buy the book on bookshop.org or on Amazon.