When Antoine Predock designed his first great residential complex—La Luz—in the late 1960s on Albuquerque’s West Mesa, he set the standard for a fresh interpretation of regionalism in the Southwest. He was not alone in this effort. Modernism and New Mexican regional forms catalyzed a number of pioneering architects here, including most of those who designed buildings in the post-John Gaw Meem period at the University of New Mexico.

But Predock’s residential regionalism is unique in that it is marked more by principles—what I would call desert principles—than by design motifs.

These principles include visual access to surroundings—views—which deflects a basic inward orientation of the design, a generally defensive posture to climate and human intrusion, a land-respecting low profile, and a New Mexican kind of pragmatism that uses a variety of seemingly mismatched materials and strategies.

 

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