For the Dornier Museum Friedrichshafen, James Turrell – who as a flight enthusiast cultivates a special relationship with this institution – has conceived a site-specific light installation that closely engages with the architecture of the building.
With the official opening of James Turrell’s light installation on October 15th 2009, the Dornier Museum Friedrichshafen will unveil an architectural intervention of international significance. After dusk the facade of the museum building, whose shape recalls an aircraft hangar, will be bathed in differentiated and interacting layers of colour according to a specially designed lighting scheme by James Turrell.
The vertical and horizontal structures of the translucent facade will be lit separately, each allowing for virtually thousands of combinations of light intensity and colour. The light literally dissolves the materiality of the various structural elements of the museum front, thus simultaneously granting and denying passers-by insight into the exhibition hall. Turrell’s work uses light as an artistic material in its own right to challenge the boundaries of human perception. Bypassing traditional symbolic or figurative representations, his installations and environments allow for a sensual, near-physical experience of light as a distinct form of reality.
The Dornier Museum Friedrichshafen, with over 5,000 square meters of exhibition space covering 100 years of air and space history, is an icon of the spirit and creativity of the pioneers of aviation. In the person of James Turrell, one of the most influential exponents of Light Art, the museum was able to enlist an artist who has been pursuing his singular vision since the 1960s with remarkable perseverance and outstanding engagement.