From New York lofts to Texan ranches in Marfa: Donald Judd’s Architecture Office opens to the public

It was 1973 when Donald Judd, the most renowned figure of Minimal Art, shifted the center of his life from New York to Marfa, a desert town that was then far from its best days. He, who had just invented New York loft living, who with his home-studio at 101 Spring Street in SoHo inspired countless artists and spaces, already saw the city as too commercial by the early ’70s. In Texas, he reclaimed buildings, created works, brought in artists (such as Dan Flavin). Later came legends like Elmgreen & Dragset’s Prada Marfa, with its storefront displaying only right shoes. But it was in that move fifty years ago that a new story began, part of Judd’s story that continues today.

In September 2025, Marfa will see the reopening of the Architecture Office, one of eleven buildings tied to the artist’s Texan life, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Glascock Building, an early 20th-century two-story brick structure that once housed a boarding house and a grocer, is a tangible piece of America’s growth. Here, Judd gave form to the most architectural side of his life, a facet still little discussed, though nearly all his work speaks to architecture, to the relationship between human beings and space.

Donald Judd,  "On architecture," 1984

The building embodies Judd’s practice of repurposing, central to understanding him since New York: a practice where not building becomes stronger than building. The lofts of SoHo were abandoned industrial spaces that artists began inhabiting, forming a community so strong it stopped Robert Moses’s plan for an urban highway, gifting us the downtown Manhattan we’ve known for decades. In 1990, Judd acquired the Glascock in Marfa and restored it, removing additions layered over time, sandblasting façades, repairing windows: “And it’s now more like it was than it has been for thirty years”, except for a non-secondary difference. “The only thing different is that it has unusual furniture inside” said Judd in fact, “but that’s all inside and kind of quiet”. 

The building finally offered space to display drawings of his architectural projects – his Swiss house in Eichholteren and the Peter Merian Haus, among others – as well as his furniture: those bridge-objects between the abstraction of minimal compositions and the tangible concreteness of domestic life. Still produced today under the Judd Foundation, they continue to inspire collaborations. The upper floor became a living space, furnished with Judd’s own pieces and Alvar Aalto’s, along with six John Chamberlain paintings installed permanently.

In 2018, a new seven-year process of restoration and reconstruction began. The masonry had degraded, as well as windows, which required boarding them up, and in 2021, with works already underway, a fire forced a dramatic restart. Architects and scholars Troy Schaum and Rosalyn Shieh rooted the project in Judd’s own approach: “Do nothing for a few days and think about it” before acting, in order to grasp the building’s role as part of a larger system, Marfa’s community, its environment, its history.

The result was a true brick-by-brick effort, where the designers themselves learnt that “strategically not doing something is much more difficult than producing the new”, as Schaum declared. “These are projects in which, if we are successful, our hands as designers will leave little trace”. The “new” Architecture Office in Marfa is therefore not only a restoration that returns to origins, but a building that preserves artworks while breathing with the desert. Most new interventions are invisible, focused on energy performance: thermal glazing, new insulation made from recycled denim, and, most radically, an entirely different climate-control strategy. Instead of a fixed-temperature system, something conventional in museums, but unthinkable in the desert, works are preserved within an acceptable range, with a system that reads outdoor temperatures and adapts to their fluctuations.

Reopening the Architecture Office is a step both complex and light – you won’t get us calling it “minimal” – but it is only the first phase of a broader plan: the restoration of more Judd Foundation buildings in Texas. A new leap for the foundation after the 2013 restoration of the SoHo loft, and a renewed breath of the spirit that first brought Judd to Marfa: the pursuit of a new life, for himself and for an entire, however small, town.