Old and new in Marfa
A transplanted Swiss architect, Upe Flueckiger, talks about change in Far West Texas
A cell-phone panorama from the cupola of the Presidio County Courthouse
In the Big Bend of Texas, Marfa is the cultural magnet. In the way the awesome mountain desert landscape attracted people from far and wide to the national park, the amazing art of Donald Judd, installed in the buildings and fields of a WWII air force base, has attracted them to the town Marfa.
Like all small rural towns, Marfa has struggled to hold full-time residents. With a population of 1,600, it’s a third the size it was in 1945. The town survives because some 50,000 a year come to see the art. (Judd’s friends, John Chamberlain and Dan Flavin came to town, massively installed their own work, and attracted many others). Now the countryside is dotted with second homes, Marfa Modern houses, giant new and remodeled ranch houses at actual ranches, and quite a few Airbnbs. Terlingua, a ghost town when I first saw it as a kid, is now a delightfully funky resort—the Lower East Side to Taos’s Tribeca.
The dots are widely spaced, which is part of the attraction. But the development makes the locals nervous. If there are million-dollar houses being 3D printed on the outskirts (Sunday Homes), it’s no wonder that employes at the shops, hotels, and restaurants can’t afford to live in Marfa.
This all makes the locals, the longtime residents, families who’ve been in the Big Bend for generations, very apprehensive. And without any real city plan or an authority to follow it through, I have to wonder what will happen. Texas is a state where zoning is frowned on, even in the big cities. The famous example is Houston.
Upe Flueckiger, a Swiss architect who was attracted to West Texas by Donald Judd’s view of architecture, had some thoughts in an informal interview I did for the Big Bend Sentinel. In 1997, Upe found a teaching job at Texas Tech, the nearest university with an architecture school. He’s now its dean.
“A younger generation in Marfa can’t really plan the future. It’s hard to strike a balance with the population who are here and the newcomers and visitors. You want to respond to their needs and to preserve the [environmental] legacy, and I think the foundations,” Upe said.
And it’s not just the built environment. Development has an impact on the land (as Judd was well aware).
“There is a population here,” Upe said, “who knows that it’s a beautiful, but also harsh climate. And now the climate is changing. The monsoon no longer happens the way it used to.”
The Big Bend is now dryer and hotter, but, “Is this visible to the person who only comes once?” asks Upe. “How do you balance with the climate, for a certain class who comes once and expects certain amenities?”
The mid-century architects mostly built the first buildings on the land, and only later did they see the scars that were left. The indigenous people in West Texas and the long-time Texans saw them. Upe said that they share a principle: “Respect nature because it’s always more powerful than you are.”
“Judd was thinking in archaeological terms. When you actually scarred a landscape, and he wrote about that, it takes much more time for the landscape to heal, you know? He saw the damages [at the air force base] 40 years on, and so he put the concrete elements in places that had already been built on,” Upe said.
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More of the interview with Upe Flueckiger