The Architecture of Place

The architectural drawings of artists Donald Judd (1928-1994) and Hörður Ágústsson (1922-2005) share complementary approaches toward understanding and describing architecture.

In this exhibition, Judd’s sketches reveal his architectural thinking for the building modifications and renovations he would pursue throughout the town of Marfa, Texas, and other related projects. These often utilised local vernaculars, such as farm buildings, military structures, and adobe construction techniques. By comparison, Ágústsson's drawings document built structures in Iceland, from turf houses to fishing stations to timber-frame churches. For Judd, drawing was a means to conceive possible built forms, while Ágústsson used the medium as a tool to document the actual built world.

Beginning in the 1980s, Judd was a regular visitor to Iceland, during which time he became fascinated by the country’s literature, landscape, history, art, and architecture. Hörður Ágústsson was an artist, designer, critic, teacher and architectural historian. An extensive part of his professional life was dedicated to the study and documentation of Iceland's vernacular architecture.

Judd met Ágústsson in the early 1990s and became fascinated by Ágústsson’s studies of Iceland’s vernacular architecture. So much so that he intended to organize an exhibition of the drawings at the Smithsonian Institution in the US, but Judd’s death in 1994 would ultimately prevent this project from being realized.

This exhibition presents an understanding of architecture thought as expressed through drawings by two artists who shared an appreciation for elegant, efficient solutions realised with particular attention to the specifics of place.