Why Judd Foundation matters.
Judd Foundation is an exacting artist-preserved residence where SoHo's cast-iron architecture meets Donald Judd's permanently arranged art, domestic spaces and dramatic integration of objects with their surroundings.
Set at the corner of Spring Street and Mercer Street near Broadway and just steps from the E.V. Haughwout Building, the Foundation occupies a narrow corner property within the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District. The five-story structure stands on a 25-by-75-foot lot with two basement levels, unusually shallow exterior framing and expansive glazing wrapping its two street elevations into what Judd characterized as a right angle of glass. Upper floors retain open loft proportions and abundant daylight, with stairs connecting distinct living, working and display spaces vertically through the former commercial building. Judd altered individual floors over decades without erasing the industrial fabric, retaining timber floors, columns and broad windows alongside interventions created for his own domestic and artistic requirements. The result is an exceptionally intact artist-designed environment in which cast iron, glass, loft volumes and Judd's restrained alterations remain inseparable from the art and furnishings occupying the building.
What defines Judd Foundation.
Judd Foundation is best known for preserving 101 Spring Street, the building where Donald Judd developed permanent installation into a central principle of his work. Judd and dancer Julie Finch purchased the 1870 cast-iron building on November 26, 1968 for $68,000, and Judd moved his studio there from East 19th Street the following January. The property became his first owned building serving simultaneously as a New York residence and studio, placing domestic life, artistic production and installation under his direct control. Peter Ballantine began renovation work on the first floor in 1969 and subsequently became the principal fabricator of Judd's plywood works; Ballantine later constructed a walnut platform bed to Judd's specifications and worked on the fifth-floor sleeping loft. Judd assigned different purposes to the floors and permanently placed his own work alongside pieces by artists including Dan Flavin and Lucas Samaras, treating placement and surrounding space as integral parts of individual works. A five-unit plywood work first exhibited with Richard Serra at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1972 acquired a site-specific form when Judd installed its units across a 60-foot length at Spring Street, making the dimensions between objects part of the work itself. Furniture design grew from the same building: Judd began creating furniture for Spring Street during the early 1970s, starting with a wooden bed and metal sinks before expanding the practice later in Texas. The property also intersected with Lower Manhattan activism as Judd and Finch opposed Robert Moses's proposed expressway across the district and supported changes permitting artists to occupy former industrial lofts. Judd's sustained control over art, furniture, architecture and placement made Spring Street the formative New York site for an approach he later extended across his properties in Marfa.
A major conservation campaign after Judd's 1994 death created a second chapter centered on preserving the building without severing the relationships he had established inside it. Planning began during the early 2000s, with Architecture Research Office serving as project architect, Walter B. Melvin Architects directing exterior restoration, Robert Silman Associates handling structural engineering and Arup responsible for mechanical, electrical, fire-protection and acoustical engineering. Construction began in 2010 with the interior conservation program targeting the aesthetic condition present when Judd died and retaining existing surfaces wherever feasible. Floors one through five remained configured as Judd's home and studio with his personal possessions and collection, leaving the cellar and sub-cellar to absorb offices, mechanical systems and other new infrastructure. Environmental studies guided heating and cooling additions needed to protect the art, furnishings and historic interior, with existing fixtures incorporated where feasible to minimize the visual effect of modern systems. The restored building opened to the public in June 2013, converting a privately shaped artist's environment into an accessible Foundation site. The project received honors from the Municipal Art Society and ENR New York in 2013, followed in 2014 by an AIA New York Chapter architecture award, the Preservation League of New York State's Best in Historic Preservation Award and an American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum. Preservation extended beyond individual artworks to the spatial relationships, historic surfaces and architectural interventions that Judd had maintained across decades of occupation.
How Judd Foundation fits.
Judd Foundation works as the anchor for a SoHo outing connecting permanent installation, the elevation of drawing into an independent institutional field and the preservation of queer art within the downtown community.
Begin at The New York Earth Room, Walter De Maria's 1977 interior earth sculpture at 141 Wooster Street, commissioned and maintained by Dia Art Foundation. The installation fills 3,600 square feet with 250 cubic yards of earth spread 22 inches deep, producing a total weight of 280,000 pounds within an otherwise spare interior. De Maria had created earlier Earth Rooms in Munich in 1968 and at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt in 1974, but neither predecessor survives. The New York work has remained on long-term public view since 1977, giving SoHo another rare setting where an artwork and its architectural location have remained joined across decades. Continue to The Drawing Center, founded in SoHo in 1977 and initially housed in a ground-floor warehouse at 137 Greene Street. The institution moved to 35 Wooster Street in 1987 and built its program around drawing as an independent artistic field, spanning historical works on paper and contemporary practices extending beyond conventional fine-art categories. Exhibitions have incorporated work by tattoo artists, chefs, novelists and prisoners alongside visual artists, expanding the institutional treatment of drawing beyond established museum divisions. Nearly five decades of activity in SoHo have made the organization a sustained center for exhibitions, publications and scholarship devoted specifically to the medium. Conclude at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, whose origins reach to a 1969 exhibition of gay artists organized by collectors Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman in their downtown loft. Their holdings expanded during the 1970s, then acquired a preservation role during the AIDS crisis as Leslie and Lohman rescued works by dying artists whose families intended to destroy them. The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation became a nonprofit in 1990, and museum accreditation followed in 2016. Its permanent collection now exceeds 30,000 artworks, carrying a private collecting project born amid SoHo's artist community into an institution devoted to the stewardship and presentation of art by queer artists. The progression moves from De Maria's enduring union of artwork and interior through an institution built specifically around drawing and culminates in Leslie and Lohman's preservation of an artistic heritage facing destruction, tracing three distinct approaches to keeping art, place and artistic intention intact in Downtown New York.
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