Antoine Predock's New Mexico house, 1993, now for sale

The house sits on a ridge above Albuquerque's west mesa, where the terrain drops into layered sandstone and the light changes every twenty minutes. Antoine Predock designed it in 1993 for a family who asked for a retreat with a view. The result is angular, low-slung, and built to frame the badlands through floor-to-ceiling glass.

The structure is concrete and steel, painted to match the rust and ochre of the surrounding rock. The roof is flat. The walls meet at odd angles, not orthogonal. Predock called the silhouette "dinosaur-like" in an early sketch, and the nickname stuck. The house doesn't read as organic architecture in the Wright sense. It reads as something that landed and stayed.

Inside, the main living space is a single volume with glass on three sides. The floors are polished concrete. The kitchen is galley-narrow, tucked behind a wall that stops short of the ceiling. Two bedrooms branch off the north side, each with its own slice of the view. The master opens to a private courtyard with a single juniper tree.

The house listed last month at $1.8 million. That's low for a Predock in this condition. The structure has been maintained but not updated. The finishes are original. The glass is single-pane. The HVAC is visible in the ceiling, industrial-style, no attempt to hide it.

Predock built dozens of houses in the Southwest in the 1980s and 90s, most of them for clients who wanted architecture that didn't apologize for the desert. This one is smaller than his best-known work (the Las Vegas Library, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights), but it holds the same logic: the site dictates the form, the form dictates the experience.

The house has been photographed three times over the last thirty years. Once for Architectural Digest in 1995, once for Dwell in 2004, and now for Wallpaper. Each time, the photographer chose the same angle: the west-facing glass at sunset, the badlands stretching into haze. The shot works because the house disappears behind it.