IN 1986, DOUGLAS S. Cramer — a producer of television shows including “Dynasty” and “The Love Boat” — asked the artist Ellsworth Kelly to design a free-standing structure on his vineyard near Santa Barbara, Calif. Cramer was a loyal collector of the artist, and wanted Kelly to make an original, large-scale artwork for his property. Kelly, who died in December 2015 at the age of 92 and whose career was defined by stripping painting and sculpture down to their elemental components of form and color, made designs for what appears from the outside to be a simple double-barrel-vaulted building, alluding to Romanesque and Cistercian religious architecture and resembling an igloo made of stucco. Inside, the artist had planned for a number of revelations. Colored-glass windows — arranged as a grid over the entrance, as a ring of tumbling squares on one side of the building, and a sunburst on the other — would bend the light in different ways. On the walls was Kelly’s take on the stations of the cross — 14 marble panels, variations on stark black-and-white abstractions. In the rear of this single-room structure, where one would expect to find the crucifix in a Christian church, would be one of Kelly’s totem sculptures — a thin column standing over the interior like a sentinel. The project eventually fell through; Kelly kept two models of the structure in his studio, though he never really believed the chapel would be built.

But in an unlikely end to this story, the artist’s building has now been constructed on the grounds of the Blanton Museum of Art, on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, almost exactly as he had envisioned it 30 years ago. Kelly planned the piece, “Austin,” which is 2,715 square feet with a 26-foot ceiling, in the final three years of his life with the help of Simone Jamille Wicha, the Blanton’s director. (She was made aware of the project by Mickey and Jeanne Klein, who are collectors of Kelly’s, alumni of the University of Texas and members of the museum’s board.) Wicha helped raise the $23 million necessary for construction and the endowment, and sent renderings and sample materials — for everything from the glass panes to the granite floor to the limestone used for the building’s exterior (changed from the original plan’s stucco to better withstand the Texas climate) — to Kelly’s home in upstate New York, where he approved every aesthetic decision. Construction began two months before his death.

“Austin,” which opens to the public this month, is very much the culmination of Kelly’s oeuvre, not just a summation of his work’s themes but his masterpiece, the grandest exploration of pure color and form in a seven-decade career spent testing the boundaries of both. It is also the kind of ambitious fantasy that artists rarely get to execute, in the same category as Christo and Jean-Claude’s 20-year attempt to suspend six miles of fabric panels over the Arkansas River (a project he abandoned last year) or Michael Heizer’s colossal “City,” a mile-and-a-half-long sculpture in the Nevada desert that the artist has been building since 1972 and which the public has never seen and perhaps never will. There are precedents for “Austin” — for instance, Donald Judd’s sprawling Chinati Foundation complex, which he worked on from 1979 until his death in 1994 to showcase his large-scale artworks and those of his contemporaries in the desert of Marfa, Tex.; Barnett Newman’s 14-part abstract painting cycle from 1958 to 1966 interpreting the stations of the cross; the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence on the French Riviera, completed in 1951, which was designed by Henri Matisse and displays his work; and Le Corbusier’s 1954 Notre-Dame du Haut, a Roman Catholic chapel in eastern France. But it’s possible that no contemporary artwork of this scale by a major artist has matched its creator’s initial ambitions so perfectly as Kelly’s “Austin.”