Donald Judd, Marfa: the furniture of a sculptor who refused the word

In 1968, Donald Judd bought a cast-iron building at 101 Spring Street, in SoHo. In 1971, he moved to Marfa, Texas. Two addresses, one idea: permanent installation, for art as much as for the bed you sleep in.

The house

101 Spring Street, restored and opened by the Judd Foundation since 2013, reads like a score: one floor for eating, one for sleeping, one for working, each work placed by Judd and never moved. In Marfa, La Mansana de Chinati, known as The Block, gathers two sheds and a house behind an adobe wall. Next door, the Chinati Foundation, opened in 1986 in a former fort, lines up a hundred aluminium pieces in two artillery sheds.

What you see there

His furniture: he began designing it in Marfa around 1973, for want of anything decent for his children. Beds, tables, benches, chairs and bookcases in pine, joined at right angles, the board left visible; then plywood, lacquered metal, hardwoods. The Judd Foundation still produces them, made to order. Around them, what he collected: chairs by Aalto, Rietveld and Thonet, Navajo rugs. And the rule, set down in his 1993 essay on the difficulty of finding a good lamp: a work of art need not serve; a piece of furniture must.

The palette

Blond pine, raw aluminium, concrete, ochre adobe, white walls. A few plain colours on the metal furniture, in flat blocks, never mixed. The desert light does the rest.

What to take home

Few objects, each in its place, for a long time. A low bed, a table whose construction you can see. Judd's furniture costs the price of a gallery piece; the lesson is free: solid pine, right angles, no visible hardware — a good joiner knows how.

Spotted a piece in this spirit? Scan it on Beyit: the app tells a Judd Foundation edition from a homemade pine bench, and gives the price of both.