A new Skyspace by artist James Turrell is open to the public in Aarhus, Denmark. As Seen Below – The Dome is located in the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. The project was a close collaboration between Turrell and the Danish architecture firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen (SHL).
The ARoS Aarhus Art Museum was designed by SHL and completed in 2004. SHL has maintained a close relationship with the institution; it collaborated with artist Olafur Eliasson on the Your Rainbow Panorama, which opened at the museum in 2011.
For As Seen Below Jette Birkeskov, SHL project director, worked alongside Morten Schmidt, SHL cofounder. Birkeskov described the Skyspace in a statement as “a place where it becomes difficult to distinguish where the artwork ends and the architecture begins.”
The opening of the new Skyspace by Turrell denotes the completion of a major expansion below ground at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum called The Next Level, also led by SHL.
The new dome by Turrell and SHL measures approximately 43,000 square feet. It is over 130 feet in diameter, and 50 feet in height. Per an ARoS press statement, the dome is Turrell’s largest Skyspace in a “museum context.”
Rebecca Matthews, ARoS museum director, called As Seen Below Turrell’s “most significant Skyspace to date” and “an extraordinary work that invites visitors to slow down, lift their gaze and experience light, time and space in deeply moving ways.”
Visitors enter the dome from a subterranean corridor connected to ARoS. As with past Skyspaces, like at Friends Seminary in New York, Turrell calibrated the light which bathes the domed space in a range of ambient color.
The shifting palette corresponds to the time of day, thereby creating “a place where nature and art merge, and where the first and last light of the day becomes a masterpiece in itself,” ARoS said in a curatorial statement.
Double-tiered seating lines the dome, inviting viewers to look up, slow down, and contemplate their place in the cosmos. A void behind the seating allows visitors to perambulate the space.
The space is non-hierarchical, like the Quaker meeting rooms Turrell has long been inspired by.
Concentric circles expressed in elongated brick line the ground plain. The circles radiate centrifugally from a central point underneath the dome’s oculus, which is open to the elements.
The lip of the oculus is extremely thin, a difficult detail to achieve nevertheless common in Turrell’s corpus. Other technological innovation entailed designing an advanced closure mechanism that allows the dome to retract.
“With As Seen Below, I am shaping the very experience of seeing rather than simply delivering an image,” Turrell said. “The architecture brings the sky close, so you recognise that the act of looking is the work itself.”