“A good example of historic provocation is Donald Judd´s 1968 intervention in Nicolas Whyte´s 1870 cast-iron loft building in SoHo, New York. Judd bought the building against all odds, for it was meant to be demolished by Robert Moses´s grand scheme for a cross-town highway –a utopian nightmare that thankfully went unrealised. Although the building was designed as a garment factory, Judd wanted it as a residence. But he did not gut the building to subdivide its spaces into conventional bedrooms. Instead, he challenged himself to change his way of life. He understood that the building was a historic provocation to go beyond the conventions of domesticity. The building confronted the marrow of his preconceptions and pushed him to think creatively past the present. He decided not to build partition walls, not to use curtains, not to act traditionally. Judd´s preservation efforts are emblematic of a historic provocation movement involving hundreds of artists whose collective work resulted in the invention of the loft lifestyle and a new type of domestic urban architecture based on undivided spaces, which is perhaps the greatest transformation of the American city home in the twentieth century. Historic provocation incites the creative drive towards the counterfactual, promotes the capacity to think outside of what is, and delimits possibilities for changing what will have been.” pp. IV – V

Future Anterior, Historic Provocation: Thinking Past Architecture and Preservation