October 20, 2026  ·  6 min read

He Sandblasted It First

The first thing Donald Judd did with a 1915 brick store in Marfa was take things off it. Thirty-five years and one fire later, the Judd Foundation finished the job.

He Sandblasted It First
Photography: Matthew Millman, via designboom
The restored Architecture Office, Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas
Matthew Millman, via designboom

The building is two stories of brick on Highland Avenue in Marfa, Texas, about five thousand square feet, put up around 1915, and it spent its first decades as a store and then as whatever else a small desert town needed it to be. Donald Judd bought it in 1990. His daughter Rainer Judd, now president of the Judd Foundation, told designboom that the first thing he did was sandblast the facade, because he "wanted to return the building to its original condition."

Sit with that for a second, because sandblasting is not a design gesture. It is a subtraction. You take off the paint, and the sign brackets, and the patch coats, and the colour somebody chose in 1962 to make the place look current, and the colour somebody else chose in 1978 to cover that, and when the grit stops you are looking at exactly what the masons laid and nothing else. Judd did not add his reading of the building. He removed everybody else's.

Then he filled it with work. The street level became his Architecture Office, which is a plain name for the room where a man best known for boxes kept his plans and his models, including the Basel Bahnhof and his house at Eichholteren in Switzerland. Upstairs was meant to hold six paintings by John Chamberlain and furniture by Alvar Aalto. The Foundation began restoring the place in 2018, repointing the brick by traditional masonry methods in the first phase, moving inside for the second, and had nearly finished when a fire tore through it in June 2021.

It burned. And still it stands.

Interior of the Architecture Office, with Judd's plans, models and furniture installed
Matthew Millman, via designboom

The fire took the attic. Rainer Judd told designboom the building "was structured with a lattice of wood beams across the attic ceiling so it all had to be rebuilt," and then she said the thing that an owner almost never says out loud: the fire handed the team "a time period to consider how to do it better, more efficiently, with the time of one hundred years to reflect upon." A hundred years of hindsight on a timber lattice, and then permission to use it. Most clients get neither.

What came back is specifiable, which is the part we care about. Insulated glazing set inside the original wood sash, so the window keeps its proportions and stops throwing heat. Recycled insulation. Solar panels sized to carry the building's daily electrical load. And a passive outdoor air-cooling system on the ground floor that works the gap between a Marfa afternoon and a Marfa night, what Rainer Judd calls a system reflecting "the 'technologies' humans have used for thousands of years in desert climates in which the cool night air flushes the building." We could draw that tomorrow. Operable openings, a stack, a control sequence, enough mass to hold the cold until morning. It is a detail, not a mood.

Rebuilt interior, Architecture Office, Judd Foundation
Matthew Millman, via designboom

Here is why any of this is worth a post rather than a press clipping. Preservation usually arrives dressed as feeling. It is about memory, and heritage, and the character of the neighbourhood, and all of that is true and none of it will win an argument with a pro forma. Judd's position, as his daughter describes it, was colder and much harder to answer: "destroying existing architecture in favor of the 'new' was against reason, for him even to an ethical degree." Not against taste. Against reason. The materials are already here, the labour that shaped them is already spent, the structure already stands up, and throwing that away to buy the same performance again is simply a bad trade. You can disagree with a man about beauty all day. It is harder to tell him his arithmetic is wrong.

And the timing is the whole argument. Rainer Judd puts the decade plainly: "Building big and new at large scales was the norm in 1980s." It was. That is the decade of the signature tower and the quoted pediment and the client who wanted a landmark by Friday, and it is the decade that made everything above necessary. Judd was off in a town of a couple thousand people running the control experiment: buy the old thing, strip it, keep it, put the work inside, do it again next door. He was photographed there in 1993. He died in 1994. The experiment kept running without him, which is the only real test a method ever gets.

Second floor of the Architecture Office, restored and reinstalled
Matthew Millman © Judd Foundation, via designboom

Marfa is sold now as an art destination, and to her credit Rainer Judd will not sign off on the brochure. "Today Marfa is considered an 'art destination,' and it was not when Don was living there," she said, and added that her father "was against Marfa becoming a cattle town museum, and an art town as well." He got one and then the other, posthumously, which is what tends to happen to people who build somewhere cheap and quiet and do it well.

The office opened to the public on 20 September 2025. Go and you will see plywood and metal furniture, drawings, models of buildings that were never built, and a pressed tin ceiling that somebody had to make twice.

Detail of the restored Architecture Office in Marfa
Matthew Millman, via designboom

The lesson is dull and it is the only one that holds. Somebody has to keep the roof on. Somebody has to repoint the brick, and rebuild the lattice, and flush the heat out at night, and come back in a hundred years and do it again, and none of that photographs. He sandblasted it first. Everything after that was maintenance.

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