Predock_Frane Architects

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Project Series 36: Predock_Frane Architects
September 2-October 19, 2008

	Predock_Frane Architects, "Inland Empire"

Predock_Frane is one of the most thoughtful and sophisticated firms to emerge in recent years from the ripe crop of young architects practicing in Southern California. Their ambition to build has been rewarded with commissions for significant residential, commercial, and institutional buildings and with winning competition entries for projects including the Central California History Museum (2000). While the practice has moved into the territory of built work and all the management and time that demands, principals Hadrian Predock and John Frane are unwilling to sacrifice their passion for exploring challenging conceptual problems.

The deep conceptual underpinnings of their practice gain physicality most often in research-based investigations and, while these projects—located at the threshold of art and architecture—often take the form of site-specific installations, their importance to the practice as a whole cannot be underestimated. Rather than seeing this aspect of the work as a separate series of art projects, Predock_Frane uses these explorations to inform and structure the development of its built work.

As a curator, what has struck me over the years of watching the practice grow is the realization that Predock_Frane never takes the easy or predictable route when invited to participate in exhibitions. From the prestigious Venice Biennale’s 9th International Architecture Exhibition—where they were one of 6 young firms selected to represent the United States—to the most recent Cooper-Hewitt National Design Triennial, Predock_Frane seizes the opportunity to conduct an investigation, often site-specific in nature, that manifests itself in an evocative and ephemeral installation. Recalling conceptual art projects Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963) or, more recently, Sarah Sze’s delicate assemblages and Olafur Eliasson’s environments, Predock_Frane’s installations are a provocative and refreshing response to the challenges of exhibiting architecture.

Architecture exhibitions are too often a dry, and frequently inscrutable, parade of scale models and technical drawings. Never meant to be seen as art objects, these tools of the trade can only ever be representations of actual buildings and cannot begin to capture those elusive qualities of light, space, and materiality that make architecture come alive. By eschewing these traditional modes of representation, Predock_Frane has developed a rich body of installation-based work in which intangible qualities and unseen relationships become visual. Always overlaid on a rigorous intellectual foundation, to Predock_Frane these projects are a way to make new worlds from a mass of research, data, and conceptual strategies.

For the U.S. Pavilion at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale, which asked participants to investigate a specific building typology. Predock_Frane was asked to examine the notion of sacred space and, in response, created a poetic room-sized installation called Acqua Alta, or Just Add Water. Rather than designing a structure to address this complex and ever-changing building typology, Predock_Frane instead undertook an investigation of the water and marsh patterns and the complex geometries of piers and pilings that underpin the city of Venice to create a space that is itself spiritual and contemplative. Predock_Frane describes the hauntingly delicate installation of thousands of monofilament strands, that were suspended from the ceiling and held in position with lead weights, as a “pixilated field” that grew from the extrusion of approximately 5,000 points demarcating the patterns uncovered by their research. Referencing the encroaching water levels in Venice, each strand of filament was stained green at varying heights creating a transparent linear environment where visitors had the sense of being caught between two worlds: a verdant glade or the unseen world beneath the sea. At the core of the architects’ scheme was the desire to give physical form to the incomprehensible intersection of the material and the immaterial.
Predock_Frane Architects’ exhibition, Inland Empire, reflects the artists’ interpretation of components of the built environment—regional depot buildings, big-box retail stores, mini-malls, housing, and the corresponding network of transportation corridors—common in the decentered landscapes of the Inland Empire. With this piece, the team deals with issues of globalism, capitalism, conspicuous consumption, design, architecture, and perhaps most fundamentally, the developing interactions between the urban, suburban, rural, and natural worlds increasingly prevalent in the 21st-century.

Predock_Frane Architects was established by Hadrian Predock and John Frane in 2000 as a collaborative research and development architecture and design studio. Their practice consists of a dual, but intertwined, relationship between their building projects and their art/design projects. In 2005, the Architectural League in New York named them as one of six emerging international architectural firms. In 2004, they were selected to represent the United States in the U.S. Pavilion during the 2004 Venice Biennale, and in 2006 they were invited to participate in the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, “Design Life Now.” This cross-disciplinary approach benefits both branches of their practice—their art/design projects benefit from the methodologies common to architecture, while their building projects benefit from the more intuitive and generative explorations that inform the art/design installations.

Over the last few years, Predock and Frane’s research has extended into philosophical investigations of several interconnected themes: the possibility of linking together oppositional strategies of fabrication, the contrasts between a high-tech/digital vs. low-tech/hand-crafted aesthetic, the site-specific nature and locational identity of each venue, and the blurring of traditional boundaries between art, design, sculpture, and architecture. For each project, the team conducts an intensive and rigorous research phase that leads them towards the final installation. They typically incorporate everyday materials—thread, string, foam-core, wood—into objects or installations that function as an index to the existing mass of materials, subjects, and structures within the designated research locality. Here, Inland Empire, while analyzing the specific nature of the local landscape in the outer reaches of the Los Angeles megalopolis, also conceptualizes and reformulates the built environment to expose an underlying chain of relations and spatial configurations endemic to 21st-century culture.

Predock_Frane Architects’ exhibition is the thirty-sixth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts. This exhibition would not have been possible without the hard work and efforts of the project team: John Frane, Hadrian Predock, Ingrid Dennert, Natalie De Fay, Jonathan Perry-Marx, and Amanda Kang (2008 Getty Foundation Multicultural Undergraduate Intern).

Rebecca McGrew
Curator