James Turrell
large glass bowl at the center. The bowl is filled with water and serves as a bath where visitors may sit or lie down. Because the bowl is connected to a transducer that converts energy into sound, anyone who submerges their head in the bath will hear the radio frequencies of space. Depending on the season and time of day, the water may buzz with solar energy, or the differing tones of Neptune, Jupiter or Uranus, or the white noise of the Milky Way. When no one is in the bath, light passes through it to an expansive sphere below, and the curvature of the glass bowl acts as a lens that projects an image of the sky onto a bed of white sand. Visitors who descend into the sphere can gaze at the sand to observe clouds, glimmering stars or the shifting hues of twilight. “So it’s a radio telescope,” Turrell said, “but it’s also a camera obscura.”
Turrell flipped through page after page of meticulous plans. The Twilight Tea Room is a 24-foot-diameter sphere designed to “look like a ball that’s rolling down a hill,” Turrell said. A telescope and mirror direct light from the sunset to a golden bowl inside. “It makes this astonishing color as you’re preparing the tea,” he said. There was a site called the Stupa Space, modeled on a shrine Turrell saw in Afghanistan, another called the Arcturus Seat, and a third known as the Saddle Space—each suffused with its own combination of sound, reverberations and light. Looking at the blueprints, I had a new appreciation for the audacity of the project, but also the crushing weight of such a monumental task. “I need another four years,” he said. “Then I can relax.”
We closed the book and drove 30odd miles to the crater, wandering into the tunnel we had seen from above. Inside, the light was low, and dust filled the air. Masons sculpted elliptical walls and tile-setters finished a low bench around the perimeter. Turrell wandered to the center of the room and looked up through a narrow opening to the sky. “We have to make everything in here perfect, so that no one can see it,” he said quietly. “All you should see is the light.”