Interview
Features
Culture
Sep 2025
Skyspaces are among Turrell’s most recognizable works: enclosed chambers that frame an opening to the sky (often called an oculus), paired with carefully calibrated lighting that changes how the eye reads color, depth, and distance. At ARoS, the approach is deliberately staged.
Visitors arrive through a subterranean, light-filled corridor before stepping into a vast domed hall, where the boundary between architecture and artwork dissolves into a single, immersive field. Inside, the dome’s interior becomes a kind of instrument. Turrell’s lighting system shifts the atmosphere from one tone to another, nudging the sky to appear unexpectedly close—or impossibly far. The result is less “spectacle” than a slow recalibration: you notice the mechanics of seeing, the time it takes for vision to adapt, and the way color can reshape space without moving a single wall.
The digital architect works with timing instead of concrete, with opacity instead of shadow. Each transition serves as a corridor, every page a new chamber defined by light and motion. This approach redefines how users inhabit a website — not as visitors but as participants in a constructed atmosphere.
By merging motion and structure, designers now build emotional spaces that breathe, shift, and react. The result is architecture without gravity — a poetic convergence of interaction, perception, and time.
“As Seen Below—The Dome” anchors ARoS – The Next Level, a long-running expansion that extends the museum below ground and rethinks the site as a cultural landscape rather than a single building.
The dome’s scale is key here: the project isn’t a gallery insertion, it’s an architectural event—one that treats the museum visit as a transition from city to corridor to chamber.
The dome typology carries its own historical weight, and the expansion’s framing leans into that: the form has long served as a symbol of gathering, power, and shared space. In this context, it becomes a contemporary civic room—quiet, seated, and collectively experienced.
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