Blue Planet Sky
James Turrell (born 1943) · 2004
You enter a square room with a stone bench running around all four walls and nothing else in it except a large square hole cut in the ceiling, open to the weather. The walls are pale and smooth, the corners are sharp, and the sky sits in that opening like a flat painted panel. Sit down and it stops being a hole. Because the edges are cut so thin, the sky seems to be pulled down into the room and pressed onto the ceiling as a single colour. Clouds slide past; birds cross it; in rain the drops fall straight through onto the stone floor, which is designed to drain.
James Turrell has built these rooms, which he calls Skyspaces, all over the world since the 1970s, and Kanazawa's is one of the largest. His material is light itself. The trick lies in the knife edge of the opening and in the even colour of the walls, which give the eye no clue about distance, so the brain reads the sky as a surface. The effect changes constantly. At midday the square is a hard blue; on a grey day it is a soft silver rectangle; at dusk, as the room's hidden lights warm up and the sky darkens, the opening passes through deep violet and blue before turning nearly black. The name refers to that blue, the colour of our own planet seen from within.
Turrell trained as a perceptual psychologist and was one of the California Light and Space artists of the 1960s. He has spent decades transforming Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona, into a giant observatory of the same idea. This room was commissioned when the museum was built and sits in the public zone, so it is one of the works you can visit even without an exhibition ticket. Do not hurry. Ten minutes on the bench is when the sky begins to move, and the stone under you slowly takes your warmth.
Did You Know? In snowfall the flakes drift straight down through the open square and settle on the floor of the room.
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