Single Spaces: museum for artist James Turrell

Pittsburgh, PA
2001

composition studio with Dutch MacDonald [edge-studio]
Carnegie Mellon University – school of architecture

“My work is about space and the light that inhabits it. It is about how you confront that space and plumb it. It is about your seeing.”
-James Turrell-

Danaë (1983)
Catso: Red (1967)
Wedgework III (1969)

Each piece by James Turrell is defined by volume: floor, walls, ceiling, sound and light.
The building eliminates the typical use of floor slab and walls to treat each room as a single entity.
The rooms are placed in a cartesian grid and rely on vertical and horizontal displacement to provide exclusive lighting.
The circulation is as a path. Rooms are accessible as tangents off of this path. One does not move through a room but rather to and from a room.
This organization also reflects a structural system by which the rooms branch from the building core.
The whole is contained in a translucent white shell to neutralize light and sound.

links:
James Turrell on wikipedia
James Turrell at The Mattress Factory