Visitors to Marfa and the Big Bend may think: “If you come by car, you might consider it a boring drive instead of taking it as an opportunity to slow down,” says Upe Flueckiger, talking to The Big Bend Sentinel last weekend in Marfa.
Traveling to the Big Bend, he said, “is about the here and now.”
“When I can, I force myself to actually go on a motorcycle because I can’t look at the phone. And I don’t go on Bluetooth and connect,” he said. “The distance from Lubbock to Marfa is 300 miles, about five hours when I try to not be online. I’m here and now — in the moment. That travel sensation helps me to slow down.”
“You have to spend more than a day in Marfa to see everything, you know. We go to the Chinati Foundation and the Judd Foundation, but you can’t really see it in one day,” he said.
“I just Googled, ‘Marfa.’ And the first thing to come up was ‘Prada Marfa,’” Flueckiger said. “At the top was Beyonce, her famous photograph on Instagram. So the goal of travel has become an Instagram post? It’s evolved into something you couldn’t foresee,” he said.
You will get more out of it if you just slow down, he says.
Flueckiger was in Marfa last week for a gathering of an advisory group of the Huckabee College of Architecture at Texas Tech, where he is dean. The school’s Design Leadership Alliance has had several meetings in Marfa, and this one included house tours and star-gazing at the McDonald Observatory. Sean O’Brien, a Dallas architect; Leonora Ask of Lubbock; and Mark Wellen of Midland were in the group.
“Upe” (pronounced OO-pay, short for Urs Peter) Flueckiger, a native of Switzerland, estimates that he has made 100 trips to Marfa. He was first attracted by an exhibit in Munster, Germany, in 1989: Donald Judd : Architektur. He decided to go to school in the U.S., won a graduate school fellowship at Virginia Tech, and earned a master’s degree in architecture. “As a graduation gift to myself, I came to Marfa in 1996.”
“I was just fascinated with the landscape here,” Flueckiger said. “That blue sky and the openness. Like, the state of Texas is 15 times larger than Switzerland.” (Editor’s note: the combined area of Presidio, Brewster, and Jeff Davis counties is about as big as Switzerland.)
“Judd did relatively modest buildings but with adaptive reuse, as we say now; he made clever interventions. The proportions are never wrong. That was powerful, and I find it really still powerful,” he said. “Now, when I come here, the first thing I look at is the proportions — and how the light comes in.”
Flueckiger learned that the closest university to Marfa with an architecture program was Texas Tech. He saw a job listing for a lecturer, applied, and moved to Lubbock in 1998. After a series of promotions he became dean in 2022. Among other books, he has written Donald Judd: Architecture in Marfa (Birkhäuser, 2007. Second edition, 2021).
“Any good architect is a student of history, even if he’s a modernist,” Flueckiger said. “Donald Judd was literally a few classes short of an art history degree.” The classical proportions indicate that, he said, but there was something else. Judd was not resistant to change, but to continual, uninterrupted change.
“Judd’s basic idea is that there should be somewhere in the universe, a place where the art is not always moving. That’s what Judd’s vision was in his work here,” Flueckiger said.
Judd worked well to blend the contemporary with the historical. Outside of Marfa he bought Casa Perez, off of Pinto Canyon Road, which the Tech group toured last week. The adobe house was simply restored; three platforms were added as separate structures.
“Good spaces earlier on could also be done by traditional craftsmen because they were intimately familiar with all the materials they use,” Flueckiger said. “In this part of the world 60% is adobe. Simple adobe structures sometimes have very thoughtful proportions.”
The blend of old and new is what gives Marfa its personality, he said. “Newcomers who are interested in what is here, you want to have them here. You also want to make it so the population who is already here is able to stay.”
“There are things which Judd couldn’t foresee. Now you have the internet and have cell phones that make remote work possible from Marfa,” Flueckiger said. “And you have Airbnbs, you know?” These changes are bringing people to Marfa as regular visitors or second-home owners, he said.
“Things grow and change, and the challenge for designers and developers is to make long-time residents as happy as the newcomers,” he said.
“There is a population here which knows that it’s a beautiful, but also harsh, climate. And now things change. You know, the Pacific monsoons no longer happen the way they used to,” he said. “But are these things visible to the person who only comes for a day or two? How do you keep that balance between a certain class who comes once and wants certain amenities — and you and me?”
“You have to respect nature because it’s always more powerful than you are. Judd knew that,” he said. “At the end of his career he was thinking in archaeological terms: when you scored a landscape — and he wrote about that — it takes much time for the landscape to heal.”
“But very few of us look at it that way, ” Flueckiger said. “Marfa is almost something else now. Because contemporary artists want to make their own art, which is also the time of life and necessary,” he said. “So, time moves on. But really, they came all because of Judd. It’s very challenging to find that balance. You want to make sure you’re in tune.”
A couple of decades after Flueckiger applied to Texas Tech, an architecture school was started 100 miles closer to Marfa. An El Paso branch of the Huckabee School has been offering a degree program since 2020.
“We’re doing it right there, so the question is, with the distances as we’ve described, could you offer architectural education in the Big Bend?” he said. “I ask myself, how can we give learning experiences for students here, maybe remote?”
“And how they can have a living opportunity, coming here. That’s the challenge,” Flueckiger said. “Education maybe can contribute, not just for the students.”