Judd explored his spatial preoccupations at La Mansana de Chinati/the Block, his name for the city-block square U.S. Army Quartermaster complex, which he bought in 1973 and moved into in 1979. His interventions and refinements of the buildings continued into the mid-1980s. He reconstructed the interiors of two steel-framed, adobe-walled airplane hangars (1943), located originally at Marfa Army Airfield. Between them Judd erected an un-plastered adobe block wall to form a U-shaped enclosure, open to the north. He surrounded the entire block with a nine-foot-high, unplastered adobe wall (later raised to twelve feet), forming narrow corridors of space where the walls of the two hangars and the central walled court parallel this perimeter wall. Judd covered the ground with a field of ruddy-colored gravel. Trees and vegetation are introduced sparingly and planted to emphasize the sculptural figuration of their trunks and branches.
Judd’s precise rendition of a raised stock tank ( tinaja) and a wood pergola ( ramada), set in a planted grove ( huerta) in the northeast corner of the enclosure, contrast with the wide, flat, sun-swept graveled ground. At La Mansana de Chinati/the Block, he condensed, abstracted, and reduced to essentials his experience of the landscape of the Trans-Pecos and the Mexican space-shaping practices traditionally applied to it.
At 601 W. San Antonio just beyond Judd’s Mansana is the Marfa Thunderbird (1959; 2004, Lake|Flato), the San Antonio architects’ desert chic remodeling of a mid-twentieth-century modern motel for Austin-based hotel impresario Liz Lambert. Across W. San Antonio (U.S. 90) Lake|Flato collaborated with Austin landscape architect Christine Ten Eyck on the design of the Thunderbird’s social space, the Capri Lounge and gardens.