IN THE SUMMER of 1968, a few months after his first retrospective at the Whitney Museum, the artist Donald Judd, then 40, went in search of a dry, open place to escape, as he later wrote in one of his many essays, “the harsh and glib situation within art in New York.” For three summers he drove through Arizona (which was “becoming crowded”) and New Mexico (“too high and cold”) until, in 1971, he found his way to Marfa, Texas, a remote ranch town 60 miles from the Mexican border.
Over the next few years, he converted a pair of former airplane hangars and a quartermaster’s office, relocated from a decommissioned military base at the edge of town, into living and working quarters, which he enclosed in a nine-foot-high adobe wall. By the end of the decade, he’d partnered with the Dia Art Foundation to buy the base for his and others’ permanent art installations. (In 1986, after a falling-out with Dia, Judd established the base as a public arts institution called the Chinati Foundation, named for a nearby mountain range.) Then, from 1989 to 1991, as an economic downturn drove more businesses from Marfa’s blocklong Main Street, he bought and restored a cluster of buildings to house his ever-expanding collections of pottery, textiles, rocks, furniture, art and books. An old Safeway became his art studio. An Art Deco bank, its entry hall as symmetrical as a Romanesque basilica, became an architecture and design studio. And in 1990, a two-story brick building — once a grocery, then a uniform shop — became an office where Judd could receive clients for the architecture practice he’d long dreamed of founding.
Other than sandblasting a layer of paint from the street-facing walls (abrading an eighth-inch of mortar in the process), Judd left the turn-of-the-century building alone. Original pressed-tin ceilings, double-hung sash windows and longleaf-pine floors made an unusually delicate backdrop for plywood tables and desks — late entries in Judd’s decades-long practice of furniture design — and rectilinear chairs in colorful plywood and sheet metal. For four years, until his death in 1994 at 65 from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Judd filled the space with prototypes, technical drawings and site models for his projects, some of them realized, like the exterior cladding for an office complex over a railway station in Basel, Switzerland, and many of them not. The town has since become a place of pilgrimage for art enthusiasts and millionaires, who’ve driven real estate prices up and many locals out. At the same time, the buildings have become a monument to Judd’s legacy.
By 2011, though, the Architecture Office’s second-floor windows, whose frames had started to rot after two decades of wear and tear, had been boarded up. “It had a decrepit, forlorn quality,” says Rainer Judd, 55, the artist’s daughter and president of the Judd Foundation, which she runs with her 57-year-old brother, Flavin, the foundation’s art director. In 2013, the siblings completed a three-year restoration of the cast-iron building at 101 Spring Street in SoHo that Judd bought as a home and studio in 1968 for $68,000. Next, they decided to turn their attention to rehabilitating their father’s properties in Marfa; the 5,000-square-foot Architecture Office, modest in scale and structurally stable, seemed a sensible place to start.
Beginning in 2018, the foundation replaced the roof, repointed the walls, archived Judd’s furniture, models and drawings and designed passive climate systems to protect those objects from Marfa’s extreme desert temperatures. The Architecture Office became “a test case for other projects in Marfa,” says the Houston-based architect Troy Schaum, who collaborated on the first phase of the restoration with Rosalyne Shieh, his partner at the time. Then, just three months before its opening in 2021, the building caught fire late one night. Flames burst up from the ground floor (insurance investigations never determined an exact cause) and spread through the timber trusses, gutting the structure. “Even though nobody was hurt, even though it was all replaceable, to see all that labor and energy evaporate in 12 hours — I wasn’t prepared for how emotional it was,” Schaum recalls.
Born in Missouri — his father worked for Western Union, his grandparents were farmers — Judd approached building with Midwestern pragmatism. “All Don’s aesthetics and design came out of a moral stance,” Flavin explains: “There’s a limit to energy, time and money and, if you’re wasting any of those things, it’s wrong.” As Judd wrote in his 1987 essay “Art and Architecture,” “Existing structures should be saved, ‘important’ and ‘unimportant’ alike.” The second phase of the restoration, led by the foundation’s director of operations and preservation, Peter Stanley, followed that dictum.
This fall, the Architecture Office will reopen with new ventilation systems, recycled-denim insulation and an upstairs apartment for researchers and staff. The forlorn windows have been uncovered, inviting fresh consideration of Judd’s architecture, founded on one of his favorite words: “reasonableness.”
JUDD DECIDED TO pursue art over architecture in 1947 while stationed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Korea. “The decisive weight was that in architecture it was necessary to deal with the clients and the public. This seemed impossible to me,” he wrote 40 years later. Still, as a philosophy major at Columbia, he studied the Renaissance and precolonial Latin American architecture, absorbing principles of proportion (“visible reasonableness,” he would call it later) and the natural integration of art and built space. Though Judd long argued for a clear delineation between art and architecture, in practice, says Caitlin Murray, the executive director of the Chinati Foundation, “these ideas were always intertwining and moving.”
Interested in form, material, color and space — as opposed to narrative, composition or self-expression — Judd, starting in the 1960s, used third-party fabricators to make three-dimensional works in plywood, plexiglass and stainless steel that explored how objects work in (and on) their environments. While museum and gallery shows severed these objects, like his famous boxes, from the spaces around them, 101 Spring Street allowed Judd to develop his ideas on low-intervention architecture and permanent installations in tandem. Here, art would respond to the scale and proportions of the five-story building itself, where he dedicated each open-plan floor to a single use — sleeping, hosting, cooking and so on — using a model he would later deploy horizontally across his properties in Marfa.
Judd died as one of the 20th century’s most hallowed artists, immortalized by the empirical clarity of his work and the aphoristic rigidity of his writings; but in his studios, Flavin says, he was more “like a kid playing.” While art historians still categorize him as a minimalist (he detested the term), his built spaces, filled with Biedermeier furniture, Pueblo pottery, Rembrandt etchings and a large array of kitchen utensils, reveal a man of expansive tastes and interests. In the Architecture Office, he juxtaposed Alvar Aalto furniture with wall works by John Chamberlain in chrome and pearlescent auto paint.
Beginning in the late 1970s, he spoke often of starting an architecture practice with the architect and academic Lauretta Vinciarelli, with whom he shared a decade-long creative and romantic partnership. That plan never materialized, but they did collaborate on ambitious proposals along Cleveland’s lakefront and for a public plaza in Providence, R.I., among others. (Models for both still stand in Judd’s Architecture Office, though neither was built — “which is why,” he wrote with typical acerbity, “no one has ever heard of Kennedy Plaza in Providence, or even Providence.”) Judd and Vinciarelli rejected American culture’s fealty to the new, as well as the era’s glib postmodern revivalism — what Judd called “capitalist realism” — that reduced classical forms to “paper cutouts,” and land, which he held as sacrosanct, to its economic potential.
Today these axioms — demolish only when necessary, pay attention to your surroundings, avoid building on virgin land — are taken for granted and Judd’s aesthetic preoccupations are apparent everywhere from the rationalist systems of the Chilean firm Pezo von Ellrichshausen to Marina Tabassum’s bold transformations of vernacular materials in Bangladesh. Even Judd’s profligate use of the word “fascist” to describe virtually any architecture he disliked feels newly relevant after the reinstatement this past January of a federal law establishing neo-Classicism as the official state style in the United States. As the artist wrote in a 1991 catalog essay that doubled as a critique of the Persian Gulf war, “Fascist architecture’s main quality is not its aggressiveness but its mindlessness.”
For all his compulsive efforts to rescue Marfa’s buildings, he hadn’t anticipated how his occupation of Marfa’s center might change its social fabric. He abhorred the idea of Marfa as an artists’ colony, yet that’s what it’s become thanks to his legacy. “He’d have had a heart attack if he saw what it is now,” says Alfredo Mediano, who built some of Judd’s first furniture and, for years, looked after his art. Judd held craftspeople in high esteem but would disregard expertise that interfered with his vision. In his adobe enclosures, for instance, he insisted on joining exposed bricks with cement mortar, choices no adobero would advise. In March, 150 feet of the compound’s east wall collapsed in unusually high winds, in part because of those decisions. Rainer, who has extended her father’s commitment to land stewardship with a project to reseed native grasses across Judd Foundation properties, says, “We have a responsibility to show up to the challenges we’ve helped create.” The work, as Judd knew, can’t be separated from its surroundings.
While Judd’s art expresses balance and stasis, he himself “was a migratory animal,” Rainer says, moving books and sketch pads to whatever space he hoped to occupy next. The Architecture Office, filled with the ephemera of the firm the artist never founded, says as much about his hopes for the future as anything he built in the past. One of the last photos of Judd shows him in that sun-washed space. Midstride, building plans in hand, he has only just entered the frame.
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