MARFA — Donald Judd’s Architecture Office in downtown Marfa officially opened last week with a big celebration, open to all. After a devastating fire in 2021, the Judd Foundation spent $3.3 million on the project. The goal was to expand the area of downtown Marfa visitors can tour.
Saturday night, the 100 block of West Oak Street shut down, and a small army of helpers laid out a line of wooden dinner tables. The community was invited to come for supper, and a line of over a hundred folks showed up, grooving to music from Primo Carrasco and his band, Tres Hombres de Marfa, while they waited for barbecue from Sawtooth Projects. Rainer and Flavin Judd, the late artist’s children and the president and artistic director of his eponymous foundation, spoke, and visiting scholars and architects offered their reflections on his work throughout the weekend.
Older Marfans remember the building on the corner of Oak Street and Highland Avenue as the Glasscock Building, named for an influential Anglo family who moved to Presidio County in 1926. Before the building belonged to the Glasscocks, it was German immigrant Hans Briam’s grocery store, whose motto, “I Never Sleep,” was underscored by “a logo of a wide-eyed owl advertising constant service,” according to the late Presidio County chronicler Cecilia Thompson.
Judd purchased the two-story building in 1990 and renovated the street level storefront as an architecture office—a separate endeavor from Judd’s Architecture Studio, housed right across the street in the old Marfa National Bank building. “That may seem semantic, but he really meant it,” explained Peter Stanley, director of operations and preservation for the Judd Foundation’s Marfa wing. “That [studio] space is more of a cerebral space where he worked through things. This building serves the very public function of an architecture office: meeting with clients and builders and setting up formal drawings.”
During his time in Marfa, Judd acquired 22 buildings in and around Marfa, many of them relics of the U.S. army’s 20th century presence in the region. After the artist passed away suddenly in 1994 from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his heirs scrambled to figure out what to do with his many properties and extensive collection of artwork and furniture, following instructions in his will to “preserve as a unity [Judd’s] works so that such works may serve as a basis for study and appreciation by scholars and the general public.”
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The Judd legacy
Through its public tours and events, the Judd Foundation aims to preserve Judd’s commitment to “permanent installation,” tying the long-term future of specific buildings, landscapes and features to furniture and works of art. The spaces aren’t literally displayed as if they were unchanged since Judd’s death, though visitors could be forgiven for interpreting them that way, given how carefully and thoughtfully they’re curated. It’s a long way to Marfa from anywhere, but Judd Foundation’s permanently installed spaces take the viewer a bit further, to a simulacrum of the art world in the second half of the twentieth century—and to Marfa when it still felt like the edge of the universe.
Many of the thousands of visitors a year who stroll through Judd’s iconic 15 untitled works in concrete in a field astride Highway 67 probably don’t associate the term “architect” with Judd, though perhaps they should. “Was Donald Judd an architect?” Urs Peter “Upe” Flueckiger, dean at Texas Tech’s Huckabee College of Architecture, wondered aloud in an address prepared for the 10th anniversary of the artist’s death. “The question is not easily answered. Judd was not a registered architect, nor did he have a degree in architecture.”
Judd wrote in a 1984 essay, “Art and Architecture,” that the artist had spent most of his life feeling like the rope in a tug of war between the two fields. As a young man, Judd served in Korea as a member of the Army Corps of Engineers. Deployment gave him plenty of time to reflect on what he wanted to do when he finally got to go to college. “My assignment to myself was to decide between being an architect or an artist, which to me was being a painter [emphasis mine],” he wrote. “Art was most likely in the balance, but the decisive weight was that in architecture it was necessary to deal with the clients and the public. This seemed impossible to me, as did the business of a firm.”
The lack of a formal license—not to mention any desire not to run a business or deal with clients—didn’t hold Judd back. Visitors to the Architecture Office will get to tour the first floor, which features plans for buildings in Europe—a sampling of 19 architectural projects he had undertaken by 1990, “some self-initiated and some by invitation and in response to design competitions,” as pointed out by the Center for Architecture, an online publication.
The curated materials also include a project a bit closer to home: a sketch of El Corazón Sagrado de la Iglesia de Jesús (The Sacred Heart of the Church of Jesus) in Ruidosa. Long before a nonprofit formed to preserve one of Presidio County’s most significant architectural relics, Judd was trying to negotiate its purchase from the Catholic Diocese of El Paso, restoring it as part of a grander vision for the Chinati Foundation. (Those plans never came to fruition.)
Judd’s Architecture Office bears mysterious inscriptions: etched in glass on the windows facing Marfa’s main drag are homages to “Clarence Judd, Architecture” and “A.N. and J. Grace, F.I. Yingling, C, R, C and D.C. Judd, Cabinetmakers.” The panes are sort of an inside joke—they’re family names, a nod to the artist’s humble lineage from Midwestern craftsmen.
Judd’s daughter, Rainer, refers to her dad as “Don,” a nod to the closeness of their relationship and his iconoclastic, ahead-of-his-time beliefs. “Don” contained multitudes—though he is remembered for his boundary-bending art, he was also just some guy from Missouri, a fact he playfully references throughout his writing.
“He was so concerned with the way the built environment— and art in the built environment—affected people’s lives and gave them a sense of dignity and groundedness and culture and community,” Rainer said. “He was so passionate about everything from urban planning to building, and good building being the result of craftsmen putting it together.”
“I think his passion was contagious,” she continued. “He would almost seem so passionate that you kind of wondered if he was all by himself.”
Upstairs will be a sanctuary for folks whose passion is Judd. The foundation plans to host a semi-private space for guests and visiting scholars, with a living room, two bathrooms, and a kitchenette. The front room—which in an earlier era would have looked out at the Post Office, the Marfa Wool & Mohair Factory and the Marfa National Bank—is still the perfect vantage point to take in the hustle and bustle of town. Its walls are adorned with John Chamberlain paintings made with car lacquer and its furniture crafted by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, creating a space that could be read as spartan and functional, or the perfect place to daydream, to feel both apart from and a part of Marfa.
The smaller of the two bathrooms bears the only visible vestige of a fire that ground construction to a halt in 2021. An investigation led by the contractor’s insurance company yielded no clues as to the cause of the fire, and the Judd Foundation decided that the show had to go on, though they had to gut the building.
It was a devastating and expensive chapter in the building’s story, but the design team made the decision to leave the wall on the inside of a bathroom medicine cabinet bare, blistered and scarred with smoke. “We decided to keep the history of the fire—a little bit of our truth,” Rainer said.
She described the process of waiting for the final vision to rise from the office as “a slow burn,” intending no pun, and described feeling a mix of excitement and overwhelm as the opening drew near. “This building seems a little more community-oriented than our other buildings because of its placement,” she said.
Rainer grounded herself with memories of the immediate aftermath of the fire, when friends and neighbors came out of the woodwork to show their support. “We got so many people coming up to us, telling us about how they lived here, or they partied here, or what it meant to them,” Rainer remembered. “There was just so much love.”
For more information about the Judd Foundation—including links to purchase tickets to tour Judd’s downtown Marfa spaces—visit juddfoundation.org.
