Moving from a town house on Spring Street in Manhattan to west Texas is bound to change one's perspective. In the town of Marfa (pop. 2,121), space is not a problem, but finding a bar that stays open past midnight is. (Try Ray's, open more often than not.) When the late, great sculptor Donald Judd decamped from New York to Marfa in 1972, he purchased some massive artillery sheds and the surrounding barracks and moved into two old factories in the center of a town that is, in essence, one short main street. While he was eager to leave Manhattan, there would be no sacrifice of his rigorous esthetics--he transported his severe sculptures and lived with them in radically spare surroundings. He also acquired a suitable ride: a 1969 Land Rover.

While not very practical when looking for a parking spot in SoHo, the famously functional vehicle--the grill is exactly that; it can be removed and used for cooking--was perfect for Judd's trips out into the desert where he collected rocks, spearheads, and snake skeletons. And yet it wasn't quite functional enough: Judd had a New Jersey company, Bernstein Brothers, customize a steel interior storage container installed between the front seats. The container continues through the back seats and into the rear of the Rover, like a sort of enormous air duct.

The most striking thing about this contrivance, however, is how much it resembles a Donald Judd sculpture. Indeed, Bernstein Brothers built many of Judd's industrial works. It's fitting, then, that the Rover's container echoes the aluminum boxes--Judd's legacy at Marfa, and his masterpiece--housed in two of his military sheds. There, one hundred boxes sit beside windows that look out over the forbidding Texas landscape, their appearance changing in the constantly shifting light. Judd's car (still owned by the Judd Foundation) is an example of his love of materials and an emblem of his search for the intersection of form and function, art and life.

--DAVID COGGINS