Donald Judd Built Furniture Because Stores Failed Him

Some of the first furniture Donald Judd designed was a pair of sinks. They went into 101 Spring Street, the five-story cast-iron building in SoHo he bought in 1968. Another early piece was a bed for his children in Marfa, Texas. By his death in 1994 he had a long catalog of chairs, tables, beds and shelves, mostly because he could not find anything worth buying.

A Sculptor Who Hated Shopping

Judd was born on June 3, 1928, in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. He served in the US Army in Korea in 1946 and 1947, worked as an art critic from 1959 to 1965, and in the early 1960s stopped painting to make the three-dimensional work that got him filed under minimalism. Furniture turned out to be a short step from there.

He explained the motive himself in a 1993 essay with a title that doubles as a complaint, It's Hard to Find a Good Lamp. The gist was that you simply could not walk into a store and buy a decent chair. So he drew his own. After the bed, as he renovated buildings in Marfa, a pergola for outdoors, shelving for his library and furniture for his ranch south of town.

He was also a serious collector of other people's furniture. The Judd Foundation lists pieces by Alvar Aalto, Gerrit Rietveld, Gustav Stickley and Rudolph Schindler in his homes, and it names Josef Albers and Le Corbusier among his influences. In 1991 he commissioned a woodworker, Robert Nicolais, to make reproductions of Schindler furniture for one of his Marfa buildings. The Le Corbusier connection runs straight into our story on Pierre Jeanneret's Chandigarh chairs.

Marfa, 1971 Onward

Judd first visited Marfa in 1971. He began buying property there in 1973, starting with the restoration of the East Building at the compound now called The Block, or La Mansana de Chinati, and in 1977 he moved there full time. The wood furniture at The Block was fabricated in the 1970s by Alfredo Mediano, who worked for Judd, and it was built for a family and a house rather than a market.

The bigger project took shape on the edge of town at the former Fort D.A. Russell, an old army post. With initial help from the Dia Art Foundation in New York, construction and installation began in 1979. The site now covers 340 acres and holds Judd's 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, made from 1982 to 1986, and 15 untitled works in concrete, made from 1980 to 1984. The Chinati Foundation opened to the public in 1986, and after Dia transferred the property and art, Judd hosted the first Chinati open house on October 10, 1987.

He kept buying. Between 1989 and 1991 he picked up the former Marfa National Bank Building, which became his Architecture Studio, a former Safeway that became an Art Studio, the old Marfa Hotel and the former Crews Hotel, among others. In June 2025 the Donald Judd Historic District, fifteen buildings and one work of art across the Chinati Foundation and The Block, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with a period of significance from 1973 to 1994.

Plywood, Aluminum and a Factory in Yorkshire

Until 1982 the furniture was made for Judd's own family and homes. That year it was first made for anyone else. In 1984 he moved into metal, working with Lehni AG, a fabricator founded in 1922, on sixteen designs including chairs, benches, tables, shelves, a desk, a stool and a bed. He used brass, copper, clear anodized aluminum and aluminum painted in RAL colors, and the Judd Foundation's history of the metal furniture notes that the bent-edge technique came from a 1964 bookshelf by the designer Andreas Christen. The metal pieces are still made individually, with a lot of handwork in bending the edges.

In 1986 he wrote an essay called On Furniture. His argument was that a chair's art lies in its reasonableness, usefulness and scale as a chair, and not in looking like art. That is about as clear a statement as anyone has made against the idea of furniture as gallery object, and it is worth holding next to the systems thinking of USM Haller, the other great metal furniture of the period, which got there from engineering.

The production story after that reads like a supply chain. In January 1987 he left Lehni for Janssen, a painted aluminum fabricator in the Netherlands. In September 1990 wood-frame furniture began at Design Workshop in Yorkshire, overseen by Hester van Royen. In June 1991 he ended wood fabrication with Jim Cooper and Ichiro Kato, and Jeff Jamieson and Rupert Deese took over making furniture at 101 Spring Street. On April 23, 1991, the Saint Louis Art Museum opened Donald Judd Furniture, his first museum show devoted to it. The Judd Foundation chronology logs all of it.

The Straight Chair

The 1993 essay ran in the catalog for a furniture retrospective at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam. In it Judd argued that a straight chair is the best kind for eating or writing, and his own chairs are the argument made physical. They sit upright and make no apology for it.

For anyone who comes to furniture from fashion or art, Judd is the clearest example of an artist who refused to let the two blur. His furniture is not a sculpture you can sit on. It is a chair built by someone who knew exactly how sculpture worked and kept it out. Texas has another pilgrimage for people who care about architecture, Tadao Ando's Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which we cover in our piece on Ando's concrete. Few names in our design section connect art, architecture and furniture this directly.

Judd died in Manhattan on February 12, 1994. He is buried at Ayala de Chinati, his ranch in far West Texas, out among the furniture he built for it.