A colossal cliff of green-tinted glass stretches along the side of a railway line, like a minty glacier greeting arriving trains. The glazing shimmers strangely in the light, its surface variously matt and gloss, wrapping offices and atriums together inside a changeable crystal skin. There’s a reason it looks unlike a typical office block – and it’s not just the Swiss precision.
Completed in 2000, the facade of Peter Merian Haus in Basel is the largest, and yet perhaps least known, work of Donald Judd, one of the 20th century’s most important minimalist artists. If you have ever pondered a polished aluminium box in an art museum, or encountered a gnomic stack of coloured acrylic rectangles projecting from a wall, they were probably by him. But few realise that Judd’s prolific output extended to building-sized commissions – or that, before his life was cut short in 1994 at the age of 65, he was busy setting up an office dedicated to architecture.
Almost 6,000 miles west of Basel’s glass monolith, in the tiny town of Marfa in the Texas desert, Judd’s architecture office has now been opened to the public, following a $3.3m, seven-year restoration, led by Houston architect Troy Schaum. Housed in an innocuous 1900s brick grocery store on the main street, it provides a fascinating window into the artist’s working process as he shifted to a larger scale – and the headaches that came with it. It reveals his struggle to move from a pristine universe of pure form, blissfully free from users, into the pragmatic world of planning permissions, clients, and the need to keep the rain out. “Design has to work,” as he put it. “Art does not.”
Architects have long lusted after the sense of rigour and clarity embodied in Judd’s austere sculptures, wishing they could emulate his pared-back surfaces in their own work. His pieces – made by professional fabricators – are milled to millimetric precision and stripped of extraneous detail, celebrating the inherent qualities of industrially produced materials, be it steel, aluminium, plywood or plexiglass.
For his part, Judd hated most architects. He railed against their misunderstanding of materials, their shallow fakery, and slammed their work as being “derivative of art”. Yet, when it came to trying to realise buildings himself, he would learn that the quest for pure autonomy of form, and his trademark flawlessness, wasn’t so easy. It might be a relief for architects to find that, when it comes to gutter details, the master of minimalism wasn’t infallible.
The architecture office is the latest building to join a vast constellation of Judd spaces in Marfa, open to pre-booked tours, including a sprawling series of studios, installed spaces and his family home, where visitors can immerse themselves in Judd’s creative world – exactly as he left it. He moved to Marfa in 1971, primarily to escape the New York art scene, choosing this former ranching town because it was one of the least populated places he could find. It helped that property was cheap and plentiful, and so he began buying up vacant hangars, banks and stores to install his work, leaving a portfolio of 22 sites by the time of his death – along with millions of dollars of debt.
“Once Don started, he was doomed,” says his son, Flavin Judd, who serves as artistic director of the Judd Foundation, of which his sister, Rainer, is president. “It’s like being a heroin addict. You have to keep buying the next one and the next one.”
Judd was often infuriated by how museums handled and displayed his art, concluding that the only solution was to do it himself. “The space surrounding my work is crucial to it,” he wrote in 1977. “Somewhere there has to be a place where the installation is well done and permanent.” Thanks to the efforts of Flavin, Rainer and a $70m endowment (built from a sale of Judd’s artwork in 2006, which raised $28m), these spaces are immaculately preserved. Sometimes eerily so. The 13,000 books in his library, housed in a former military hangar, remain untouched, the uncomfortable-looking plywood chairs un-sat-on. For all his austerity, Judd’s own favoured reading chair, it is pleasing to discover, was a comfy, worn leather recliner.
The architecture office was heavily damaged by a fire during restoration, and the reconstruction has left it more spotless than ever – complete with recycled denim insulation, a new shading canopy and a clever passive cooling system to mitigate the desert heat. The interior has been staged just as Judd left it, his rows of pencils and French curve-rulers preciously arranged like sacred relics.
One wall is devoted to technical drawings of the Basel office block, in full swing when he died, while a series of Judd-designed tables display sketches and models of other projects. There are some prototype porcelain bowls, which couldn’t go into production because porcelain didn’t work in the flat, sharp-edged planes that Judd demanded. There are his plywood chairs, which retail for $9,000, and some prototype glass bottles designed to interlock – although, once again, the glass wouldn’t quite bend to Judd’s will.
Jumping up a scale, there is a model of his unrealised masterplan for a waterfront site in Cleveland, commissioned in 1986 by the Progressive Insurance Company, which shows the artist’s obsession with proportion and repetition. A series of identical rectangular courtyard blocks march in a regimented row, one for an art museum, one for a hotel, one for a health club, and one – incongruously – for a rock’n’roll hall of fame. It’s not hard to see why it didn’t get built: the client’s favourite architect was Frank Gehry, and Judd’s contribution looks more like a bleak business park than a place of waterfront leisure.
Nearby is a site model of the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria, which was supposed to be a collaboration with the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Fifteen years Judd’s junior, Zumthor had written to his minimalist idol in rapturous tones in 1990, asking the artist’s opinion of his design for the art museum. But when the client then commissioned Judd to design the museum’s offices, across from the gallery, Zumthor was incensed. “He should not be working as an architect,” he fumed in a letter to the director, suggesting Judd be commissioned to produce an outdoor artwork instead. The museum planned to relocate Judd’s building – a curious barrel-vaulted shed – to another site, but he died before it could progress.
Maddeningly, Judd’s design isn’t on display here, presumably because there wasn’t a drawing of it on his desk the day he died. A folder of documents marked “Bregenz” lies temptingly on the table, but it may never be touched, not even by a guide. The sense of frustration recurs throughout, with just the odd fragment of each project on show, and no explanatory text or photos to show if the buildings were ever built. This is taking minimalism to absurd lengths.
“It is what it is,” says Flavin. “Our approach is to show, not tell.” That might make sense for Judd’s installed spaces, where a pure, unmediated encounter with the work was what the artist intended. But in the case of his architecture, it seems perverse not to even show it, or provide any context. As with the other buildings in Marfa, visitors are taken through the space by a (well-informed) guide, but you’ll have to Google the projects, or make an appointment in the archive, to find out what they looked like. “This was one of his textile designs,” the guide tells me, gesturing to some folded sheets of paper. What lies inside the folds, we will never know.
Away from the office, a visceral experience of Judd’s architecture can thankfully be had in the many buildings he adapted around town, pioneering adaptive reuse long before it was fashionable. From military hangars to former hotels, his approach was to strip structures back to their bones and sometimes “correct” them with additions, often creating symmetry or hinting at a pure geometric form. The courtyard layout of his home and studio – known as The Block – recalls the Korean palaces he saw when he was stationed as an army engineer in Seoul, a symmetrical, ceremonial compound, with a high perimeter wall of adobe mud bricks.
At the Chinati foundation, a contemporary art centre that Judd created at a former military base, he added two huge barrel-vaulted metal roofs to a pair of artillery sheds. It was partly to fix the leaking flat concrete roofs, but the chief intention was clearly to give the buildings a majestic presence in the landscape, their great semicircular profiles visible on the horizon.
In both cases, Judd’s priority of form over function has left a legacy of costly maintenance issues, which Schaum is busy fixing. The artist’s decision to use cement mortar with the adobe bricks, instead of the vernacular mud-based kind, has left his perimeter wall with critical structural issues. A whole chunk of it recently collapsed. To be faithful to Judd’s intention, it will be rebuilt in the same way, but with hidden steel rods. Similarly, Judd’s desire to make his barrel-vaulted roofs sit seamlessly on the walls below has led to years of leaks in the artillery sheds. As the architectural historian Julian Rose writes, the roof junction was “a three-dimensional nightmare, almost impossible to seal”.
Together, it’s enough to keep the Judd and Chinati foundations busy for a while. “It’s like maintaining the Golden Gate Bridge,” says Schaum. “Once it’s completed, you start back at the other end. You think of Judd’s legacy as permanent and inevitable. But working out here in the desert, you realise how precarious it actually is.”