A massive wall of green-tinted glass stretches alongside a railway line in Basel, Switzerland, resembling a mint-colored glacier welcoming incoming trains. The glazing creates an unusual shimmer in the light, its surface alternating between matte and glossy finishes as it wraps around offices and atriums within a ever-changing crystal exterior. There's a compelling reason this building looks nothing like a typical office complex – and it's not just Swiss engineering precision.
Completed in 2000, the facade of the Peter Merian Haus in Basel represents the largest, yet perhaps least recognized work by Donald Judd, one of the 20th century's most influential minimalist artists. Art museum visitors worldwide have likely encountered his polished aluminum boxes or mysterious stacks of colored acrylic rectangles projecting from gallery walls. However, few people realize that Judd's extensive body of work included building-scale architectural commissions, or that before his premature death in 1994 at age 65, he was actively establishing an office dedicated to architecture.
Nearly 6,000 miles west of Basel's glass monument, in the small desert town of Marfa, Texas, Judd's architecture office has recently opened to the public following a $3.3 million, seven-year restoration led by Houston architect Troy Schaum. Housed within an unassuming 1900s brick grocery store on the main street, the space offers a fascinating glimpse into the artist's working process as he transitioned to larger-scale projects – and the significant challenges that accompanied this shift. The office reveals his difficult journey from a pristine world of pure form, blissfully free from practical users, into the pragmatic reality of planning permissions, demanding clients, and the fundamental need to keep buildings weatherproof. As Judd himself observed, "Design has to work. Art does not."
Architects have long admired the rigorous clarity embodied in Judd's austere sculptures, hoping to replicate his stripped-down surfaces in their own architectural work. His pieces, manufactured by professional fabricators, were milled to millimeter precision and stripped of unnecessary details, celebrating the inherent qualities of industrially produced materials including steel, aluminum, plywood, and plexiglass. Ironically, Judd harbored deep contempt for most architects, criticizing their misunderstanding of materials, their superficial fakery, and condemning their work as derivative of art. Yet when he attempted to realize buildings himself, he discovered that achieving pure formal autonomy and his signature flawlessness proved far more challenging than anticipated.
The architecture office represents the newest addition to an extensive constellation of Judd spaces throughout Marfa, all available for pre-booked tours. This collection includes sprawling studios, specially installed spaces, and his family residence, where visitors can fully immerse themselves in Judd's creative universe exactly as he left it. He relocated to Marfa in 1971, primarily to escape New York's art scene, selecting this former ranching town because it was among the least populated places he could find. The abundance of cheap, available property proved irresistible, leading him to purchase vacant hangars, banks, and stores to house his artwork installations, ultimately accumulating a portfolio of 22 sites by his death – along with millions of dollars in debt.
"Once Don started, he was doomed," explains his son Flavin Judd, who serves as artistic director of the Judd Foundation, while his sister Rainer serves as president. "It's like being a heroin addict. You have to keep buying the next one and the next one." Judd's frustration with how museums handled and displayed his art led him to conclude that the only solution was taking complete control 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 efforts by Flavin, Rainer, and a $70 million endowment built from a 2006 artwork sale that raised $28 million, these spaces are immaculately preserved – sometimes to an eerie degree. The 13,000 books in his library, housed in a former military hangar, remain completely untouched, with uncomfortable-looking plywood chairs never sat upon. Despite his austere aesthetic, visitors will be pleased to discover that Judd's personally preferred reading chair was a comfortable, well-worn leather recliner.
The architecture office suffered significant fire damage during restoration, but reconstruction has left it more pristine than ever, complete with recycled denim insulation, a new shading canopy, and an innovative passive cooling system to combat desert heat. The interior has been carefully staged exactly as Judd left it, with rows of pencils and French curve-rulers arranged like precious sacred relics. One wall displays technical drawings of the Basel office building, which was in full development when he died, while a series of Judd-designed tables showcase sketches and models of other projects.
The office contains fascinating examples of Judd's struggles with material limitations. Prototype porcelain bowls never reached production because porcelain couldn't accommodate the flat, sharp-edged planes Judd demanded. His plywood chairs, which currently retail for $9,000, are displayed alongside prototype glass bottles designed to interlock – though once again, glass wouldn't bend to Judd's exacting will. A model of his unrealized masterplan for a Cleveland waterfront site, commissioned in 1986 by Progressive Insurance Company, demonstrates the artist's obsession with proportion and repetition. The plan features identical rectangular courtyard blocks arranged in regimented rows, designated for an art museum, hotel, health club, and incongruously, a rock and roll hall of fame.
Nearby sits a site model of the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria, originally planned as a collaboration with Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Fifteen years Judd's junior, Zumthor had written to his minimalist idol in rapturous terms in 1990, seeking the artist's opinion on his museum design. However, when the client subsequently commissioned Judd to design the museum's offices across from the gallery, Zumthor became furious. "He should not be working as an architect," Zumthor fumed in a letter to the director, suggesting Judd be commissioned for an outdoor artwork instead. The museum planned to relocate Judd's building – a curious barrel-vaulted structure – to another site, but he died before the project could advance.
Frustratingly, many project details remain inaccessible to visitors. Judd's Bregenz design isn't displayed, presumably because no drawing sat on his desk the day he died. A folder marked "Bregenz" lies tantalizingly on the table, but it may never be opened, not even by guides. This sense of frustration recurs throughout the exhibition, with only fragments of each project visible and no explanatory text or photographs showing whether buildings were actually constructed. "It is what it is," says Flavin Judd. "Our approach is to show, not tell."
While this philosophy might suit Judd's installed art spaces, where pure, unmediated encounters were intended, it seems counterproductive for architectural projects. Visitors are guided through spaces by knowledgeable staff, but must Google projects or schedule archive appointments to learn about actual appearances. "This was one of his textile designs," a guide explains, gesturing to folded papers whose contents remain forever hidden.
Fortunately, visceral experiences of Judd's architecture exist throughout Marfa's adapted buildings, where he pioneered adaptive reuse long before it became fashionable. From military hangars to former hotels, his approach involved stripping structures to their essential elements, sometimes adding corrections to create symmetry or suggest pure geometric forms. His home and studio compound, known as "The Block," recalls Korean palaces he observed while stationed as an army engineer in Seoul – a symmetrical, ceremonial complex surrounded by high adobe mud brick walls.
At the Chinati Foundation, a contemporary art center Judd created at a former military base, he added two enormous barrel-vaulted metal roofs to artillery sheds. While partly addressing leaking concrete roofs, the primary intention was clearly providing majestic landscape presence, with great semicircular profiles visible on the horizon. However, Judd's prioritization of form over function has created expensive ongoing maintenance challenges that Schaum continues addressing.
The artist's decision to use cement mortar with adobe bricks, instead of traditional vernacular mud-based mortar, has created critical structural problems in his perimeter wall. "He wrongly used cement mortar on the perimeter wall. A chunk of it recently collapsed," according to restoration reports. To remain faithful to Judd's intentions, the wall will be rebuilt identically but with concealed steel reinforcement. Similarly, Judd's desire for seamless barrel-vaulted roof integration has caused years of leaks in artillery sheds. As architectural historian Julian Rose notes, "the roof junction was a three-dimensional nightmare, almost impossible to seal."
These ongoing challenges will keep the Judd and Chinati foundations occupied indefinitely. "It's like maintaining the Golden Gate Bridge," Schaum observes. "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 realize how precarious it actually is." The story of Judd's architectural ventures serves as a humbling reminder that even minimalist masters face the same fundamental challenges that plague all architects – keeping buildings standing and keeping the rain out.
