The practical philosophy of Donald Judd

American artist Donald Judd is renowned as a standard-bearer of the minimalism movement, but his contributions to architecture are much less documented. Disillusioned with the art scene in New York in the early 1970s, Judd left for the remote desert town of Marfa, Texas, where an abundance of space and distance from institutional motives enabled him to expand his formal inquiries into architecture. Judd’s practice in Marfa constituted a substantial body of projects that might today be classed as adaptive reuse. He gave a new lease of life to 22 disused buildings in and around town, including a complex the size of an entire city block. In the last decade of his life, Judd also broadened his portfolio in Europe, designing an unrealized administration building for the Kunsthaus Bregenz, and a six-story office building in collaboration with architect Hans Zwimpfer, which was completed in 2000. Still, more than 30 years after his death, Judd’s architecture practice remains largely overlooked.

Today, the Judd family is making efforts to highlight this important part of his legacy, which includes the reopening of Judd’s Architecture Office—the former grocery store in Marfa that Judd restored as a space to host clients. On-site during the opening, The World Around executive director Beatrice Galilee spoke with Julian Rose, historian and critic of art and architecture, and a scholar of Judd’s work about the renowned artist’s path to designing buildings, his profound philosophy of space, and the vital lessons his practice offers for architects today.

Beatrice Galilee: I want to start with Judd’s architecture practice. The first buildings he made were in [the Mexican state of] Baja California, but his relationship with architecture began quite a while before that. Can you tell us about how Judd comes to architecture?

Julian Rose: So Judd’s architecture practice is definitely not as well-known as his art practice, but in my personal perspective it’s hard to separate the two—I think Judd’s interest in architecture is fundamental both to who he was and everything that he made. As far as beginnings, Judd served in the US military from 1946-1947, and he was stationed at Kimpo air base in Korea. He was definitely involved in construction there, so he had some kind of architectural and engineering experience years before he was working as an artist. But I think the thing that really pushed Judd into the practice of architecture was a desire to present his art exactly the way he wanted it to be seen.

BG: So in the beginning it was really for him. The container in which the art was displayed was as important, in a way, as the art itself.

JR: Exactly. In one of his essays he used the phrase “in defense of my work.” And I think as he was starting to show in the 1960s, he just wasn’t that happy with a lot of the environments that his work was appearing in. The idea was to create the perfect environment. 

When trying to understand artistic innovations like this, I always find it helpful to go back and you see what people said the first time they saw it. With hindsight, it’s too easy to say, oh, it’s minimalism, I know all about that. But early critics were so confused by Judd’s work! There's one line that really sticks in my mind from a mid-60s review where this writer is trying to describe walking through a Judd show and says, “I felt as if I was strolling through one of the most important aspects of the work.” I think people intuited that this work was fundamentally about space, and they didn’t quite know how to talk about it because, up to that point in time, that’s not what sculpture had been about. 

That’s the fundamental achievement, I think, of Judd’s artwork: it’s not about a visual relationship between a viewer and an object, but a sort of perceptual relationship between a viewer, an object, and a spatial container. And once that’s your premise, it makes total sense to me that you would then want to design the whole shebang.

“That’s the fundamental achievement of Judd’s artwork: it’s not about a visual relationship between a viewer and an object, but a sort of perceptual relationship between a viewer, an object, and a spatial container. And once that’s your premise, it makes total sense that you would then want to design the whole shebang.”

BG: Many of Judd’s most famous essays on architecture are profoundly critical. He basically lavishes praise on Louis Kahn, and then everybody else he sort of trashes, right? He was really despairing about almost all of his contemporaries.

JR: This is another area where I think he was unbelievably prescient. There’s an essay from the 1980s, when he’s becoming really disillusioned with art museums, and he says that art has become an excuse for the building that it’s housed in. This was almost a decade-and-a-half before the Guggenheim Bilbao opened. So he saw the writing on the wall.

But when we revisit what Judd said about architecture today, I think it’s helpful to keep in mind that he was writing during the ascendancy of postmodernism. It was popular—and populist—architecture After modernism had been so brutal and clinical, the idea was to present a more sensitive image through a façade of historicism, even though it was mostly just a palliative for rampant development. Judd was just watching it happen and just saying out loud: “This is insanity.” There’s one essay where he references Philip Johnson’s Chippendale building on the cover of Time. So a totally different moment in the culture, you know? No building, no matter how good it is, gets on the cover of Time in 2025.

BG: To me, it’s so interesting that now we’re trying to reuse these office buildings, and what we’re finding out is basically what Judd foretold. We don’t know how to reuse a floor plate that large; they don’t lend themselves to reuse. It was probably evident at the time, but it does feel interesting to see that now.

JR: And this is where his vision of architecture is so relevant. If you think of the architect no longer as the heroic constructor, the technical expert, the genius form-maker—if you start to think about the architect as someone whose role is to be particularly sensitive to space and think creatively about how that space is used, then actually the architect could be an artist, or the architect could really collaborate with an artist in a new way. I think Judd’s legacy can teach us a lot about the redefinition of architectural practice that’s necessary today. More so than his critiques of architecture, I think it’s Judd’s philosophy of practice that is really vital.

BG: How did Judd’s project in Marfa start and where are we at now: what constitutes Judd's legacy in Marfa?

JR: Well, cut to New York in the late 60s, like many artists of his generation, Judd was feeling quite uncomfortable with the increasing commercialism of the art world. So he was looking for a place to go. He settled on Marfa, and he started buying buildings.

What’s most fascinating about Marfa is the combination it offers—it’s about more than just architecture. Judd was deeply interested in the landscape and the ecology of the region, and he thought about it very intelligently. So you get this whole environmental aspect of his work here, which is especially relevant today. At the same time, he was also interested in it because it was a sort of industrial ruin, so you get this legacy of his engagement with, basically, the military industrial complex. There was a large army base in the town for many years. One of the first structures Judd bought was an airplane hangar from the First World War, I believe. The property that Judd bought that is now the Chinati foundation was the army base itself, Fort DA Russel.

In terms of what Judd did to the structures themselves, I feel it’s important to remember that it wasn't a romantic act of preservation. In the Judd foundation the archives, there's very revealing correspondence with his insurance agent—he had trouble getting some of these structures insured because they were essentially perceived as worthless.

If you look at Marfa today and say, oh it’s a picturesque place that has a wonderful local history, it’s maybe easier to fit what Judd did here into how you think about historic preservation in general. But when we think about Judd as a model we could learn from, it’s important to think about how hardcore his approach was, and how raw these spaces were. He was willing to just engage with that directly.

“When we think about Judd as a model we could learn from, it’s important to think about how hardcore his approach was, and how raw these spaces were. He was willing to just engage with that directly.”

BG: And what about Judd’s relationship to land itself? You indicated his interest in ecologies and the environment. His attitude at that time feels very contemporary to me.

JR: Absolutely. He felt that a lot of contemporary architecture was essentially a form of destruction, so he was super rigorous about never building on untouched land in his own work. 

And he had such a wide range of interest. Gathering the Desert [by Gary Paul Nabhan] is one book that I know Judd was interested in. It’s in his library. It’s basically a study of the US-Mexico borderlands, looking at indigenous knowledge and resource use and essentially arguing that this region could serve as a useful precedent in preparation for future times of resource scarcity around the globe. That feels uncannily relevant in 2025.

I think about that a lot. Everyone knows the concrete boxes [15 untitled works in concrete, 1980-1984], but when you look through all the surviving documentation of the work being installed, Judd was also working with soil consultants to was reseed that field with native grasses.

In his mind, that’s a constituent part of the artwork. But that’s the kind of thing that drops out of the art historical story, because it’s hard to communicate. You photograph those beautiful boxes at sunset, and you publish it, and it’s Land Art, and that’s what people remember. But I think in his mind that project was totally inseparable from the work of environmentalism. That’s such a contemporary attitude. 

I think his interest in ecology is a huge part of his legacy. And what’s especially fascinating is that these are two problems we're facing today: how to deal with all the damage done by industrial capitalism, and how to recalibrate the relationship between the built environment and the natural environment. So the fact that Judd was able to take a whole army base and use it for cultural and environmental good—I think that’s part of what makes Marfa so exciting.

“This is not functionalism at all; it’s not form follows function, because defining the use of the space was part of his creative practice.”

BG: What philosophy of architecture emerges from this work in Marfa?

JR: I think it’s inseparable from Judd’s overarching philosophy of rehabilitating the town and the landscape. When you see Judd as someone who’s an expert in the use of space, in shaping space to create specific interactions and experiences, what emerges is really a social philosophy in which the architect is a kind of program expert: he’s really thinking about the relationship between spatial envelopes and social activities, and how changing one can change the other.

I think that’s a really contemporary approach. What you see throughout the whole town is that Judd took a building—whether an old bank or an old store—and put it back to use, even if in some cases that meant actually inventing a use for it. This is not functionalism at all; it's not form follows function, because defining the use of the space was part of his creative practice. 

Sadly, a lot of this was cut short: I think when it came to architecture his ambition was unlimited. So in a way we don’t know exactly how far he would have carried it. But I think that that’s also what the Judd Foundation is doing now, in a sense: continuing that legacy. And it’s about bringing new functions and new forms of sociality to these spaces. If I could distill Judd’s approach to architecture down to one thing, I would say that he cared deeply about the social function of space.