The Quest to Preserve Donald Judd's Marfa

New York Times

04-08-2025

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.
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