When I was touring the renovated Santa Fe home of the Princess de Polignac (see page 98) with builder Jim McGorty, agog at the unending display of stunning hand-crafted detail in this ’60s era adobe, I just had to chuckle at the groovy rock shower grotto in the guest house. Cool. I had one of those once.

Lordy, if New Mexico isn’t home to the rough and the refined, the highbrow and the low, the princess and the pauper.

Twenty-five years ago near Placitas I was paupering in a squat round house born in the golden era of owner-builder experimentation, those fringe factor, what-the-hey days of the 1970s. It’s a heritage shared in spirit if not in execution by the Princess’ house. Under the gifted hands of McGorty and crew, her adobe chateau has been resurrected as an apotheosis of the experimental, no-corner-square, no-line-straight building philosophy practiced early in the careers of many now-prominent Boomer builders.

Trust me, my rental house anchored the other end of that spectrum. The groovy waterfall shower drooled a low-pressure stream over its lava-rock lip with barely enough force to rinse shampoo from a crew cut. I swear that house had no insulation under its rough-sawn, accidentally black-stained plank walls. But the freedom it embodied, the uncensored self-expression, the slavish adoration of a drop-dead Sandia Peak view captured the fearless, place-inspired improvisation that continues to influence some of New Mexico’s best home building.

At its highest level, this design sensibility produces enduring art in buildings. No artist has earned greater accolades for practicing it—or played such a seminal role in first defining, then refining it—as Albuquerque’s Antoine Predock, FAIA. Predock is the most recent winner of the Design Gold Medal given by the American Institute of Architects (see page 88). He came to New Mexico in the 1950s to study architecture. More importantly, perhaps, he osmotically absorbed the cultural gestalt, the indigenous design vocabulary, and the “poetry” of the landscape, to use his word. In a sorcerer’s apprenticeship to place, he transmuted these lessons into a design philosophy of “portable regionalism.”

 

Along the way to achieving rock star status, Predock has cut a trail connecting the millennia-old legacy of New Mexico architecture to the liberated sensibilities of the present. Dozens of architects and builders have been directly mentored or indirectly influenced by Predock, their combined contributions suggesting a new, culturally grounded, place-centered expression of how to live in this magnificent setting.