The fall night was crisp and clear. Sunlight was just fading over the Hudson River. I was making my way to the Friends Seminary School on East 16th Street in New York, where I was invited to witness artist James Turrell’s Leading, a “skyspace” that opened last spring at the apex of the newly renovated and expanded school, completed by Perkins Eastman. The invitation was quite explicit: please arrive well before 6:07 p.m., when Turrell’s “piece” would commence, unveiling a blanket of night sky visible above the ceiling. As about a dozen of us settled in, the wash of light and color in the room changed, slowly transforming the sky from vibrant purple to deep blue, steel gray to umber, dark maroon to forest green. Twinkling stars winked here and there, and the silvery body of a jetliner en route from JFK airport momentarily streaked across Turrell’s square ceiling opening—an interloper from another dimension. 

Over the course of a half-hour, Leading unfolded above our heads. We sat back quietly on smooth teak benches, transfixed, with an occasional “ooh” or “ahh” offered up as the walls and ceiling of the skyspace slowly metamorphosed in contrasting colors, making the 6-foot-square aperture above our heads appear to be a floating slice of light against the pristine plaster ceiling. And then, it ended. The ceiling aperture closed as the exterior roof silently rolled back into place. Each of us had seen the sky as we had likely never seen it before, and might never again. Back out on the sidewalk, the firmament above my head had essentially disappeared, saturated with the night lights of Manhattan.

Leading is Turrell’s 94th skyspace, which have been constructed across the globe. I’ve experienced a few of them, including The Color Inside, at the University of Texas at Austin—oval in shape, with a circular aperture; and Sky Pesher, at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, an exterior room inserted into a hillside. More than a decade ago, Turrell installed a temporary skyspace in the rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, which completely transformed one of the world’s most famous interiors into a glowing womb throbbing with color, under which people reclined on upholstered mats, feeling their spirits lifted. 

Such spaces transform us because they transcend. For thousands of years, architecture has done this: the massive presence of the Great Pyramid; the nave of Chartres Cathedral; the sanctuary of the Pantheon, which is a perfect sphere surmounted by a concrete dome with a 27-foot-diameter opening to the sky, through which one can experience falling rain. To be in the presence of such architecture, to be a witness to its mystical light and atmosphere, fills us with wonder. We are awestruck, barely believing our own eyes. 

“We have a duty to beauty,” an architect-mentor of mine maintains. In our understandable fixation with function, performance, and environmental responsibility, we risk overlooking how architecture can transport us out of ourselves, allowing us to experience something that makes us speechless. Awe and wonder are more than just icing on architectural cake. They’re just as essential as keeping us dry and warm. They feed our spirits. 

In her recent book Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think, Belgian philosopher Helen De Cruz writes about awe and wonder as essential components of a fully formed life. “The experience of wonder belongs to all of us, not just to children, scientists, and philosophers,” she notes. It can be found in even the most seemingly mundane experiences, such as watching a ladybug scale a blade of grass. “To understand awe and wonder is to appreciate an important and enduring aspect of being human,” writes De Cruz. Such states as wonder and awe help move our focus away from ourselves and our own concerns, to see ourselves instead “as part of an interconnected whole.” They help cultivate a sense of “transcendent humbleness,” opening us to our environment. De Cruz sees architecture as a primary source of wonder and awe. She points out that monumental religious architecture, for example, is found around the world, “ranging from buildings such as Hagia Sophia in Istanbul … the splendors and intricacies of the Hindu temples in Angkor Wat, Cambodia, and European Gothic cathedrals that were built ever airier and higher.” Such architecture “exploits our sensory responses to vastness.” 

In a way, this makes Turrell’s skyspace at Friends Seminary School even more remarkable, because it’s a relatively small room, about 20 feet square with a 19-foot ceiling—essentially a cube. It occupies a tower on the addition’s top floor. In 2014, Principal Robert “Bo” Lauder says, he had hoped to persuade Turrell—then a resident of the Gramercy Park neighborhood and still a practicing Quaker who for many years attended the landmarked 1860 Friends Meetinghouse connected to the school—to create a light installation for the new addition. After visiting the school and discussing some ideas with Lauder, Turrell said: “Take me to your roof.” The artist appraised it as the perfect spot for a new skyspace and offered to donate his design. Lauder raised additional funds outside of the addition’s construction budget to realize the project, and Turrell worked with architect Frances Halsband to create it.

In their first meeting, Turrell sketched ideas for the space, which he conceived as a cubic volume. An essential component of the design was that none of the surrounding buildings in this part of lower Manhattan should be visible through the 6-foot square ceiling aperture, which, according to Halsband, was an absolute necessity for Turrell. The aperture is covered with a small hip roof on rollers that slides back to reveal the sky (no portion of the rolling roof was to be seen when open). At one point in the approvals process, someone noticed that the addition would push the building’s height above what the zoning code allows. Some strategizing between the architects and their code experts hit upon a solution: the skyspace could be considered a “steeple” on this religion-based school building, which is an allowable variance.

The opening in the skyspace’s ceiling needed to be a razor-thin line so that an edge could not be perceived—essentially, an aperture with no thickness. This knifelike detail was achieved with a tapered and sharpened edge of precast concrete and glass fiber. Halsband was struck with how diligently Turrell focused on such design details. “He wasn’t some dreamy artist,” she says. He didn’t once discuss the quality of the light that Leading would capture. Instead, says Halsband, he approached the creation of the skyspace with engineering precision, even determining the exact angle of the back of the teak benches for the best sightlines, the teak’s color, and the smoothness of their oiled finish. (Turrell’s educational background is in perceptual psychology, mathematics, geology, and astronomy.) The 7-foot-tall bench backs conceal a light cove that encircles the skyspace with LEDs that wash the white plaster walls and ceiling with a programmed display of colored light, calibrated to the exact time of each day for the next 15 years. Turrell is an alchemist of light, leaving no careless detail to menace his magic.

Because this is a K–12 school with nearly 800 students, Leading can appeal to young people across a wide range of ages and interests. Halsband points out that for even a kindergartener, the skyspace is accessible as a source of wonder. Lauder says that it’s been used as a setting for a poetry class—a ready-made environment that might coax awe from an aspiring writer. Students linger there to read a book, or do some yoga, or simply sit quietly and meditate. It’s also accessible to students from nearby schools, as well as the public.

Perhaps its most important function is to strike wonder in the heart, awe in the eye, and to connect us with human beings across millennia, who gazed at the star-studded sky on crystal nights, and marveled. 

Featured image: Clouds drift through a slice of sky in the Friends Seminary School. Photograph by Nicholas Wan, courtesy of Perkins Eastman.