Turrell Skyspace

The Turrell Skyspaceopened to the public on the Rice University campus on June 14 to great gasps at it's beauty. At first you wonder what the UFO looking thing on top of the hill is and what purpose it serves, those thoughts vanish the second you get inside. The Texas pink granite benches are poised within the specialised plaster walls which hide speakers. This space wasn't created just for the sunrise and sunset light shows but for a one of a kind music experience.

During the summer, the skyspace will be closed on Tuesdays for private events but will be open to the public throughout the rest of the week. Two light shows are held daily, the morning light show begins 40 minutes before sunrise, and the evening light show begins at sunset. Want to know when Sunrise is??The calendar for Skyspace is here skyspace.rice.eduand shows the time of sunrise and sunset for each date and includes notices about when the skyspace will be closed to the public.

DISH Pink with the grey sky (which was actually a bright light blue!)The pyramid-like Turrell Skyspace towers above a 12-foot-high grass berm (What DISH lovingly refers to at the Milti-Million Dollar Hill with a Hole in it) sits just east of Rice’s Shepherd School of Music. Visitors seated on the skyspace’s lower and upper viewing areas can gaze up at the 72-by-72-foot white roof, which offers a view of the sky through a 14-by-14-foot opening. Lights projected on the ceiling will change colors as the sun rises and sets, and these will impact the color of the sky as seen by visitors. Although the color changes on the ceiling can be viewed from outside the skyspace, the magical color changes of the sky through the opening in the ceiling can be experienced only from inside the structure.

Thomas Phifer and Partners served as the architect for the skyspace, and Linbeck was the contractor. The roof is a composition of several specifically engineered materials with a carbon-steel knife edge. The seating area on the lower level is made of pink and gray Texas granite from Marble Falls; on the upper level, poured-concrete benches provide seating. A sequence of LED lights installed in the upper level is programmed to create the light show on the ceiling in sync with sunset and sunrise. The show lasts about 40 minutes, and the light program can operate in a variety of weather conditions.

Rice has the first Turrell skyspace to be engineered for acoustics. As mentioned earlier, twelve state-of-the-art speakers are “hidden” in the special accoustic transferring plaster walls. Although music will not be played during the sunset and sunrise light shows, Turrell is creating additional light shows for use by the Shepherd School for live performances as well as for use by students who participate in the Rice Electroacoustic Music Labs. On Tuesdays the students from the Shepherd School will hold classes there. Can you imagine walking by on a cool, crisp fall afternoon to the gorgeous sounds emitting from the Skyspace? Sounds like a perfect dream!

Mustard Gold with the light blue sky! It's about to start!The Skyspace on the Rice Campus is not the first, over the past four decades, Turrell has created skyspaces in 25 countries. The skyspace at Rice is his 73rd and one of the largest.

“Each is unique,” he said. “I wanted this one to feel open because it’s a very public space and at the same time it’s an enclosure.”

Turrell said the relation of inside to outside is very important.

“This is one in which you will see the sky be almost any color you like, in fact, quite some surprising tones,” he said. “If you take a photo of the sky in this skyspace, the color you see in the opening is not actually going to show up in your camera because in fact it is not there.

“This is a gentle reminder that because we give the sky its color and can then change the color of the sky, we create the reality in which we live. The light that we make is something that changes the reality of how we perceive the sky. We do create the world in which we live to a much larger extent than we are willing to take responsibility for.”

For a little more information about the Turrell Skyspace, watch the video below!