On 19 June, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum opened the doors to something that has been more than twenty years in the making. As Seen Below, a monumental Skyspace by James Turrell, now sits beneath the museum grounds as the centrepiece of The Next Level, a 4,000 square metre underground expansion designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen. It is Turrell's 100th Skyspace and the largest ever installed within a museum context.
The numbers alone are striking. Sixteen metres high and forty metres in diameter, the domed chamber is accessed through an underground corridor that leads visitors away from the city surface before opening into a circular space where a large aperture at the apex frames the sky. Turrell has described As Seen Below as an experience of consciously entering the earth and emerging in the heavens, and that vertical movement gives the installation its physical rhythm before the light even begins to shift.
Within the dome, the work operates across several modes. In Open Sky, the oculus remains open and the ceiling frames the sky as a changing field of colour during museum hours. In Colour Shift, the aperture closes and the chamber becomes a fully interior environment, with light washing across the walls until the dome seems to lose its fixed surface. During Twilight sessions at sunrise and sunset, artificial colour moves with the changing daylight, making the sky appear to respond from above. A movable roof element of approximately 100 square metres allows the opening to be closed, creating different conditions of light and perception within the space.
The project was developed in close collaboration between Turrell, ARoS and Schmidt Hammer Lassen over more than a decade. Rather than fitting the artwork into a completed architectural framework, the dome, the opening to the sky, the material palette and the visitor journey were all designed as interconnected elements of a single spatial experience. The proportions of the chamber, the quality of light at different times of day, the acoustics: every detail serves the same intention.
The expansion adds a new layer to a museum already shaped by large scale installation. From above, the grass covered dome appears as a circular mound set beside the red brick body of ARoS and the elevated ring of Olafur Eliasson's Your rainbow panorama on the roof. The relationship is direct without feeling repetitive. Eliasson's walkway colours the city from the roofline, while Turrell's dome pulls visitors below grade and asks them to look upward from a place apart.
The Next Level also includes The Salling Gallery, a subterranean exhibition space for annual contemporary art commissions that opened in 2025, and ARoS Art Square, a permanent outdoor space for art presentations. Funding came from the Salling Foundations, the New Carlsberg Foundation, Aarhus Municipality, ARoS and a private anonymous donor. Together they have given Denmark's second city a new reason to look up, even from underground.
