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Pagei 106/107 Antoine Predock American Hcrttage Center Laramie. Wyoming, 1987-93 Depending on the angle from which it is viewed, the American Heritage Center seems to alter-nate between a highly f uturistic design and an ancient relic.

This type of geologically oriented modernity ił vcry much on the mind of other south western American architects such as Will Bruder.

Bow Peak and Pilot's Knob in the distant Snowy Rangę and the nearer Laramie Rangę. As Predock says, this "consciously monumental landscape abstraction represents a symbol for futurę campus growth... and a statement of the powerful spirit of Wyoming.” Situated on a 10 ha site, the complex includes the American Heritage Center and Fine Arts Museum. The patinated copper cone at the center of the building corresponds to a nearby round basketball arena, but also calls forth images of a UFO, one of the architect's recurring themes, and is equally reminiscent of a mountainous volcanic shape or a strange warrior's helmet. This example illus-trates Predock's capacity to fuse sources of inspiration that can be at once geolo-gical and anchored in popular culture. The cone and its base house the American Heritage Center, a research facility for scholars. A long, terraced volume with fiat roofs, trailing from the cone, houses the University of Wyoming Art Museum, with its collection of artifacts ranging from saddles to minerał maps and stills from Hollywood Westerns. The block-like elements of the museum, intended to recall the architecture of Pueblo Indians, are built with sandblasted concrete blocks specially formed with a coarse aggregate.

The idea of an architecture situated in some sense between the distant past and the imagined futurę was of course not invented by Antoine Predock. Even the helmet and UFO metaphors are present, for example, in the indoor sports facilities of Fumihiko Maki in Japan. Predock's American Heritage Center is nonetheless a further indication of the liberation of architects to seek new and unusual forms. Such forms are naturally morę effective if they carry an element of historical or even geological presence. In fact it seems entirely natural that the cultural sphere would be one in which an effort to bring together the diverse trends and preoccupations of architecture would reach fruition. The projects published here are by no means an exhaustive panorama of new cultural facilities, but they do provide an indication of the breadth and inspiration of current thinking.

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