Antoine Predock, Architect Who Channeled the Southwest, Dies at 87

Antoine Predock, an Albuquerque-based architect who became known for buildings that resonated with the landscape of the American Southwest, earning him international acclaim and prestigious commissions as far away as Canada, Costa Rica and Qatar, died on Saturday at his home in Albuquerque. He was 87.

The cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease, according to his wife, Constance DeJong, a sculptor.

Mr. Predock’s early buildings were extensions of the desert. In a 1994 monograph, “Antoine Predock: Architect,” he wrote of the temptation, when facing a vast, forbidding landscape, to build something familiar, like a bank with a classical facade. “Another option, one that I have chosen, is to make buildings that suggest an analogous landscape,” he wrote.

His later buildings, some far from Albuquerque, used materials and finishes appropriate to their locations. But they maintained the geological, almost primordiallook that characterized Mr. Predock’s best work. Those projects ranged from the San Diego Padres’ baseball stadium to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to the Flint RiverQuarium, in Albany, Ga.

Victoria Young, an architectural historian, wrote in the Encyclopedia of 20th Century Architecture that Mr. Predock (pronounced PREE-dock) “returns to architecture a mysterious connection with place and human feeling that many believe has been eroded by 20th century life.”