STYLE : STYLEMAKER : On a Roll

The Desert King has rolled into town--on rollerblades. Antoine Predock, the 55-year-old architect who has made Albuquerque, N.M., the base for his far-flung and world-renowned architectural activities, has recently taken an anonymous little bungalow in Venice. That way, he can both rollerblade on the boardwalk and direct his growing California practice.

He just finished a beachfront residence and the new Mandell Weiss Forum in San Diego, a black snake coiled behind a wall of reflective glass that turns patrons into performers. Now he is at work on an administration building for Cal Poly Pomona (with a triangular “skyroom” for watching airplanes line up on their approach into LAX), mesa-like dormitories for UCLA and a civic center in Thousand Oaks.

Predock brings with him “the discipline of the desert,” as he puts it, “an awareness of the place that is absolute, but also a place where everything is new, raw.” His forms are grand, mute and evocative but also filled with strange geometries and sometimes covered with neon. Both mystic and irreverent, steeped in ancient civilizations and a fan of the latest gadgets, he sees Los Angeles as a natural home for his activities: “This is the world city of the moment, like Paris or New York once were. It is always fresh. But I also like the polarity of the place, the pull of the ocean and the mountains.”

He points to the window where he is sitting. A two-ton pane framed in bright red steel, it moves on a hinge whose design he borrowed from an aerospace firm. It can become a window to the ocean or a plane reflecting the sky and opening the house to the craziness of the boardwalk. Framed by his architecture, balancing on his ‘blades, he surveys his second home: “It all comes together here--earth, sky and water, and culture,” he says, then skates off to his next commission.