The Color Inside
The Color Inside
Overland Partners + James Turrell Skyspace
ARCHITECTS
James Turrell Skyspace, Overland Partners
ARCHITECT IN CHARGE
Rick Archer
DESIGN TEAM
James Lancaster, Michelle Stedman, Jim Taylor
CLIENT
Landmarks, The Public Art Program Of The University Of Texas At Austin
CONSULTANTS
Datum Gojer Engineers, Hmg & Associates, Hughes Associates, Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Matthew Schreiber
PHOTOGRAPHS
Florian Holzherr, Paul Bardagjy , Fernando Ortega
AREA
520 Ft²
YEAR
2013
LOCATION
United States
CATEGORY
Cultural Center
The Color Inside is a milestone in The University of Texas at Austin’s Landmarks public art collection. Located on the roof of the Student Activity Center, the project arose from the student body’s desire for a peaceful retreat at the Student Activity Center (SAC).
The SAC serves as a highly active social and cultural center with amenities that include, amongst others, a ballroom, black box theater, auditorium, conference rooms, and offices for student organizations.
Through an in-depth participatory design process, students played a pivotal role in defining the programmatic functions of the SAC and the role it would play on campus.
As a result, internationally acclaimed artist James Turrell was commissioned to design a “Skyspace,”.
One of his renowned inhabitable artworks, in order to offer a space for quiet amidst the dynamic atmosphere of the SAC.
Turrell’s work challenges the traditional relationship between art as object and viewer.
Through the manipulation of color and light, the installation radically alters the viewer’s perception of the sky.
This perceptual process closely parallels those cultivated by many Eastern contemplative practices, and Turrell.
Himself often likens his work to the Quaker practices of his own youth, in which the act of silent prayer is described as “going inside to greet the light.”
Tucked away on the rooftop of the SAC, the Skyspace remains partially hidden from view from the street below. Visitors make their way up to the third floor of the SAC.
Once inside, visitors discover an elliptical space with radiantly heated, honed black basalt seating, basalt flooring, and a reclined plaster bench back that directs focus to an oculus in the ceiling above.
Computer-controlled LED lights tucked within a light cove illuminate the “sensing space”—a plaster surface located above the viewing bench—with changing color during an hour-long program everyday at dawn and dusk.
The space can comfortably accommodate 25 viewers at a time, offering an intimate yet communal experience. With the belief that simplicity facilitates spirituality.
The elliptical shape of the Skyspace required nontraditional structural grids that relate to the major and minor axes of the ellipse.
The weight of the structure prevented it from being installed directly on the concrete roof of the SAC, and as a result, the Skyspace actually hovers 7/8” above the roof.
His work has no object, no physical presence; instead light and perception are his artistic media.
As Turrell has said, “Light is not so much something that reveals as it is the revelation.”
By drawing attention to the perceptual mechanisms at work in the act of seeing.
He instills the awareness that subjective experience shapes our understanding of reality and the world around us.
