Refurbishment of historic building into offices

When faced with the request to turn an early XXth century building into offices for a Mexican company, the architect’s imagination immediately gravitated to the works of Donald Judd in Marfa. Perhaps, the building itself, located along Houston’s Buffalo Bayou, was reminiscent of the buildings that Judd bought and transformed in Presidio County, industrial and simple, but with a few moments of refinement.

More importantly, Judd’s modus operandi offered a clear strategy for how to intervene in such a building: throughout his career, Judd would purchase a property, then move into the empty space and start fabricating furniture for his daily use as well as works of art that would become permanently installed. Once he felt the space was complete, he would move out and start again somewhere else.

This lack of hierarchy between furniture and art, as well as the idea that architecture can happen through smaller interventions, became the blueprint for the project. The architects proceeded to clean the existing concrete structure down to its bones, correcting and repairing some of the abuses that it had undergone through its many lives. Once the original space was visible, they designed and installed in it as series of volumetric pieces, light wooden boxes that house the smaller pieces of program but also inhabit the industrial space as sculptures, creating and lending proportion to the spaces around them.

Special attention was given to the details and materiality of the project. Custom furniture echoed the language of the architectural intervention and blended with it. The use of warm tones, raw materials, and natural light helped strike a balance between the rough and the sophisticated, creating a relaxed and subdued atmosphere in opposition to the stridence of contemporary corporate vernacular.

Through its careful consideration of existing conditions and its balance between the industrial and the intimate, the project also manages to strike a different balance, between the company’s origins in Mexico and its new location in Houston, a testament to a group of architects and designers working across borders to find common ground.


 Project authors: Luis Aldrete, Jesús Vassallo, Troy Schaum, Aagnes