Thomas Phifer with Kyle Dugdale
Spring 2017
Yale School of Architecture
The studio takes as its starting point the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Founded by Donald Judd in 1979, the former Fort Russell campus was opened to the public in 1986 with the mission to preserve and present art in direct dialogue with the landscape.
The project seeks to interrogate Judd's work and original intent. Ultimately, a means to query the territoriality of the rural interior, and an investigation into the relationship between the rituals of private life, the habits of production, and the demands of exhibition within artistic environs. A set of spatial experiments preceded the building proposal: a set of interior rooms without an exterior form. The ritualized interior presents an opportunity to develop the intimate spaces of living independent of the external pressures of landscape and context. To translate this sentiment into built form results in a creation that approaches patterns of profound movement in the synchronization and recitation of daily rituals. The test of these new modes for dwelling is in their implementation on the sites within Marfa.
Judd's use of serial repetition helps to desubjectify his art. The multiple creates a system. In much the same way, the structures are of the same family, but each maintains a different character. The datum at the crest is consistent, but each structure meets the ground in highly specific ways. The scale of the studios changes where the land changes. The spacing encourages metabolic rhythm, breathing, choreography.
In Fort D. A. Russell, we find a bygone regime of power subsumed by art and landscape. We enjoy these landscapes because they mark the passage of potency, the concealment and surveillance, and the residue of an empire. Here, we witness the dissolution of power. The preservationist has the delicate task of curating entropy, of manufacturing the picturesque. On the site, artists move vertically into their residences in order to experience the horizon from a new vantage, moving through layers of fortification. The monolith and the multiple create the system.
Each artist is exhibited in a separate building on the 340- acre site, creating a campus of autonomous compounds, each with a specific relationship with the landscape. The foundation is unique in its treatment of art and its context as a permanent condition. By always positioning art within a landscape, the work is continuously defined by its surroundings: its scale, its expanse, its relationship to the sky and to the horizon, to the desert, and to the terrain. This permanence between art and landscape is embedded in the territory of the town, creating a unique terrain in which work can be experienced as stable artifacts, “specific objects” unbeholden to the increasingly market-driven world of art.