“The fifth floor is extremely special for its sanctuary quality,” Rainer Judd told ARTINFO recently, recalling the vast childhood bedroom she once shared with her brother Flavin and their father Donald. Donald Judd had named his son after friend Dan Flavin, the creator of the fluorescent light work that currently resides in the family’s former resting place and now defines its mood: “In the day, it’s bright and very white, and when the Dan Flavin goes on at night, it’s this very romantic blue other world,” Rainer said.
The luminous blue-and-red installation shines on the top floor of 101 Spring Street, the cast-iron Soho studio Donald Judd bought in 1968 for a mere $68,000. In June, the building opens to the public as the Judd Foundation, a veritable museum of art and ephemera where the Flavin piece will always be on — even in the event of a fire. “Because the fifth floor has no permanent lighting installed, the sculpture has been rigged to be part of the emergency lighting system,” said Architecture Research Office principal Adam Yarinsky, the project architect helming the building’s $23-million restoration.
That clever adaptation of the space’s existing artwork illustrates the painstaking efforts ARO and a team of four other architectural studios have taken to bring the 19th-century relic up to modern fire safety codes — all the while preserving what Yarinsky describes as the “ineffable, meditative quality” of the space. This delicate undertaking was exacerbated Donald Judd himself, for whom safety wasn’t exactly a priority (“The John Chamberlain on the wall certainly isn’t child-friendly,” one of the house’s tour guides pointed out, nodding to the mass of sharp, twisted metal hanging on a fifth-floor bedroom wall). During his life, Judd had removed the sprinklers on the third, fourth, and fifth floors (allegedly because of their interruptive aesthetics), leaving architects with the daunting challenge of inserting an entire modern infrastructure — sprinklers, in addition to the temperature and humidity controls one would find in a museum — into a 19th-century building without interfering with the domestic zen of the interior.
During a recent tour of the space, it looked as though the architects had succeeded. Aside from a few “IN CASE OF FIRE” instructions posted on the walls, those who know the home claim that very little has changed. Artifacts of Judd’s life call the house back to 1994, the year he died of lymphoma. The kitchen on the second floor still houses the family’s wares. Glass jars full of sugar cubes and bags of Darjeeling line the countertops. Repetitive collections of glasses and plates line the shelves, evoking the serial nature of the great minimalist’s art.
Undeterred by the building’s vastness, Judd took command of its massive open spaces: a 19th-century wood-burning stove stands in the middle of the second floor, while one of his rectangular sculptures mimics the straightforward geometry of the third. Aalvar Alto chairs from the 1930s face the startingly shiny windows that wrap the perimeter of the rooms. They too have undergone a subtle makeover; the original windows were replaced with double planes of glass that prevents condensation, which, as any gallerist knows, spells potential disaster for art. On the fifth floor, where the white sheets of a lone mattress glow blue in the light of the Dan Flavin, a set of pencils and a sharpening knife lie within arm’s reach of the artist’s bed.
Despite the substantial efforts to maintain the house as it was, the Soho beyond the freshly restored cast-iron exterior bustles unlike it ever had before, a way Flavin compared to a strip mall. Rainer, however, is decidedly less dismayed by the area’s transformation. “After ‘84, ‘85 [the neighborhood] changed, and I don’t track the changes so much since then,” she said. “It’s been more people and more money and variations of that, but there’s an upside to people with money coming in that’s also true in spaces of nature: It means it gets taken care of.”
To see inside the Judd Foundation, click the slideshow.