WHAT WOULD JUDD DO?

The ravages of tire, sandblasting, and time did not destroy the late artist's office, which has finally opened to the public after a painstaking restoration.

- CAMILLE OKHIO

Donald Judd kept his architecture office in this 1907 building in Marfa, Texas.

Over more than eight decades, the Glascock Building in Marfa, Texas, wore many hats.

Built in 1907, it was first a boarding house with a grocery on the ground floor. Then it became a uniform shop. In 1990 it caught Donald Judd’s attention.

The artist had risen to the top of New York’s art world before abandoning it in 1971 for a remote ranch in the West Texas desert. Marfa became his creative hub. Airplane hangars were repurposed as exhibition spaces for his sculptures. An old Safeway was turned into his art studio.

Judd bought the 5,000-square-foot Glascock Building to house his growing architecture practice. He furnished the space, which still had the original tin ceilings and long-leaf pine floors, with spare plywood furniture of his own design. “It was mostly a place for him to look at drawings and think,” says Flavin Judd, the artist’s son and artistic director of the Judd Foundation.