A colossal cliff of green-tinted glass stretches along the side of a railway line, like a minty glacier greeting arriving trains. The glazing shimmers strangely in the light, its surface variously matt and gloss, wrapping offices and atriums together inside a changeable crystal skin. There’s a reason it looks unlike a typical office block – and it’s not just the Swiss precision.
Completed in 2000, in collaboration with local architect Hans Zwimpfer, the facade of Peter Merian Haus in Basel is the largest, and yet perhaps least known, work of Donald Judd, one of the 20th century’s most important minimalist artists. If you have ever pondered a polished aluminium box in an art museum, or encountered a gnomic stack of coloured acrylic rectangles projecting from a wall, they were probably by him. But few realise that Judd’s prolific output extended to building-sized commissions – or that, before his life was cut short in 1994 at the age of 65, he was busy setting up an office dedicated to architecture.
