ARCHITEKTUR
By Donald Judd, Münster: Westfälischer Kunstverein, 1989, 213 pp., ca. 100 color and black and white illustrations, DM30.
Donald Judd’s Architektur, published by the Westfälischer Kunstverein on the occasion of an exhibition of his work at the museum this summer, is a book in the archetypal sense, for it contains everything you’d like a book to contain: well-printed photographs, drawings, text, each carefully balanced with the other and with the format of the pages, the pages feeling good to the touch, and together giving the book the right weight, and the book having the right size, though the cover is a little too careful in its gray linen, where gray card would have been closer to the Spartan contents.
In the texts, Judd writes about spaces, places, buildings, rooms, and things he has re-formed, or hack-formed, or out-formed, or left alone. In each of the texts—which are in both English and German, of which I preferred the English because the words are shorter and more even, with fewer capitals (though it is comfortable to have the German around the page)—I learn about things, the things in rooms, the rooms in buildings, the buildings in spaces, and about spaces. And of other things I learn in asides. And what I see from the photographs (which carry the light coming into the rooms from the outside), and what I understand from the drawings, and what I read in the texts, show me objects I can work on or sit at to work on in rooms and buildings and places where I would like to be.
—Candida Höfer
