James Turrell’s 100th Skyspace opens beneath the ARoS museum

After more than a decade since the initial idea for a James Turrell Skyspace at the Aros museum in Aarhus was hatched, Turrell’s one hundredth Skyspace, As Seen Below—The Dome, is now finally open.

It’s a massive feat of construction, carried out immaculately by Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, who also built the Aros museum. Forty metres across and sixteen metres high, The Dome is one of the largest of Turrell’s Skyspaces. Here, as in much of the artist works, the architecture is not simply a placeholder for his art, but an integral part of it.

'The architecture holds the sky close, so you recognize that the act of looking is the work itself. Here, light isn’t description, it’s the substance you stand within,' Turrell explains.

Visitors approach the dome through a one-hundred-metre-long corridor below the museum and emerge into the massive space, resembling something from a science-fiction film set, void of any decoration. There is simply the dome, a gently sloping floor made of concrete tiles with a central circular “eye” made of Norwegian granite directly below the six metre wide aperture in the centre of the dome, and a circular bench around the perimeter set at a slightly smaller diameter than the dome itself.

The interior of the dome itself is constructed of individual petal-shaped fibreglass panels that have been smoothed with putty by one dedicated construction worker called Heinrich. 'He basically did the whole dome himself, as he wasn’t comfortable letting any other people work on this,' says Jette Birkeskov, Partner-in-Charge and Project Director at Schmidt Hammer Lassen, who, together with Morten Schmidt, has played a central role in the collaboration throughout the project’s development.

The dome is finished in three coats of matt white paint and 1,100 LED light sources around the perimeter light up the walls, contrasting with the sky as seen through the aperture. The magic happens when Turrell changes a seemingly grey Danish sky into bright blue, green, pink or purple. Our eyes deceive us, and we adjust the colour of the sky to contrast with the colour of the walls. So what at one moment looks like a bright blue sky (due to a white/yellow contrasting light on the dome’s walls) slowly turns green, then grey and pink as Turrell adjust the colour temperature of the LED light within the dome.

Turrell’s Skyspace requires time to fully appreciate. It is the subtle changes in light, wind, a sudden glimpse of a bird flying above the aperture or someone dropping a phone on the dome floor reverberating throughout the dome, that create a unique experience in time and space. No two visitors will have the exact same experience, and no two visits will feel the same. This is the power of Turrell’s art and it will provide a huge draw for visitors to Aros for decades to come.

aros.dk