WITH A NEWLY SIMPLIFIED architectural vocabulary, institu-

tions of constraint and display began to multiply quickly in the

1970s. Many economies of scale were achieved through repetition

of spaces and structural elements in a single building, as well as

the massive expansions in networks of exhibition and discipline

as standardized forms were replicated in many locations. Serial

organizations become ends in their own right in “telephone-

pole” prisons, where any number of cellblocks are strung along

an extruded service corridor, and in survey museums that extend

A VOLUME OF LOUIS KAHN’S work and writing, interleafed with

a note from the Kimbell Museum, rests today on Donald Judd’s

kitchen table. Preserved for posterity in The Block, Judd’s com-

pound in Marfa, Texas, the scene divides one of two hangars that

Judd converted into gallery spaces for his earlier work. Another

identical hangar includes more exhibition space and a library

for his 5,000-volume collection of books, and a nine-foot adobe

wall bounds the square complex. Truly a cloister of Minimalism,

Judd’s residential retreat acts simultaneously as a repository of

the artist’s interests — forty feet of shelving devoted to Native

American tribes and modern architecture, each roughly twice

what he allotted to contemporary art — and a clear demarcation

work. Judd’s Block, like all of his holdings in Marfa, manages to

be both monastic in its rigors and somehow decadent in its mania

for simple geometries.