Marfa long has been known for its big skies, vast desert landscapes, colliding cloudbanks and crystalline light. California artist Robert Irwin, working with the San Antonio firm Ford, Powell & Carson Architects, distilled those natural elements into a vessel of light and shadow — a rebuilt old military hospital — in a building-sized art installation that opened in 2016.
Called “untitled (dawn to dusk), 2016,” the Irwin project culminated 17 years of collaboration between the artist, the Marfa-based Chinati Foundation (which carries on artist Donald Judd’s work) and FPC.
It is a testament to the bonds that tie art and architecture together, and it won a Texas Society of Architects 2017 Design Award — one of 11 winners out of 313 entries.
Marfa, the small West Texas town established in 1883 as a water stop on the Southern Pacific line, has long been a center for ranching, railroads and the military.
Since the 1970s, when renowned artist Judd arrived in town from New York and began buying up properties, Marfa also has been a contemporary art hub.
In 1999, the Chinati Foundation invited Irwin to create a work of art centered on the crumbling hospital on the grounds of the decomissioned Fort D.A. Russell just south of downtown, a stone’s throw from the renovated armory buildings and barracks where the work of 13 artists is on permanent display.
Although the building is Irwin’s design, FPC made sure it would be structurally sound and drew up the construction documents. There are subtleties — like the double rafters of the exterior overhang and the landscape borders of corten steel bolted to buried concrete — that you don’t pay much attention to, but FPC architects know they are there.
The building, which has 14-foot ceilings, is divided inside into light and dark halves, with 160-foot, floor-to-ceiling scrims, or screens, (a favorite Irwin material) centered down each long hallway, with white scrims on one side with clear windows and black scrims on the other side with tinted windows. Light pours into the building and is reflected and absorbed by the scrims from 92 windows evenly spaced 10 feet apart, placed 5 feet up from the concrete floor, with canted sills to draw the eye up into the view.
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Growing up in Houston, Steve Bennett started reading the newspaper before he even entered kindergarten. Ok, it was the comics, but still. It instilled in him a love of reading and art that carried him through Temple High School in Central Texas and the University of Texas at Austin. After graduating with a degree in journalism in 1982, Steve went to work for the San Antonio Light, covering the arts. When the Light closed, he found work in Olympia, Wash. as a features editor and endured the soggy weather for two years before getting homesick and returning to Texas. Steve's been with the Express-News for 15 years, first as an editor in the features section, the last 10 or so covering books, the visual arts and most recently architecture and design.