Donald Judd’s Architecture Office Is Reborn After $3.3 Million Restoration After seven years and a fire, the Judd Foundation has restored the space the artist used
By Richard Whiddington
The first thing Donald Judd did after purchasing a two-story brick building in downtown Marfa was sandblast the paint from its façade. It was 1990 and Judd’s footprint in west Texas was growing in step with the town’s economic decline. As with the full city block and the abandoned U.S. army base he’d previously purchased, Judd wanted to return the former boarding house and grocery to its original condition, or “situation” as the iconoclast might have called it.
He planned to convert the nearly century old building into an architectural office and while the interior might take on an unconventional layout (one filled with unusual furniture), it had to remain structurally true to its context. This meant removing plaster to expose the walls, extracting excess mortar between bricks, and leaving the press tinned ceiling and wooden floors unchanged.
More than three decades on, the same philosophy has guided the Judd Foundation in its restoration of the Architecture Office. It’s the first of several planned restorations in Marfa to be completed—the Foundation previously restored Judd’s Manhattan Spring Street residence in 2013—though it didn’t come without hardship.
