Acclaimed artist turns his attention to a downtown office development
SARAH MILROY
Globe & Mail
Internationally acclaimed American artist James Turrell, best known for his massive reconfiguration of a volcanic crater in the Arizona desert, has set his sights on downtown Toronto.
Mr. Turrell, who was in town yesterday speaking at the University of Toronto, will create a work of public art for Brookfield Properties' forthcoming Bay Adelaide Centre, a high-end office tower in the city's business district slated for completion in 2009.
While details of the artwork's final form are still to be confirmed, the piece "will be Turrell's largest public commission to date," says Toronto public art consultant Karen Mills. The budget is set at approximately $3-million.
Mr. Turrell's work will involve the installation of shifting coloured light illuminations to transform the outdoor plaza, the lobby, as well as the side supports and top of the building's exterior, transforming the edifice into a slowly shifting beacon in the downtown core.
"I am interested in the secret life of buildings at night," Mr. Turrell said yesterday in an interview, describing the way office towers transform when they glow against the night sky.
Citing such structures as Rockefeller Center or the Empire State Building in New York, he said: "In the day time they are quite modestly clothed, but at night they become something completely different."
His work for Toronto will expand on that phenomenon. The project extends a body of his work dealing with artificial illumination, but he is perhaps best known for his "skyrooms," which he has made in Dallas, Brooklyn, Seattle and elsewhere -- architectural interiors with all or a portion of the ceiling removed to admit a framed view of the sky.
These are, however, modest in comparison with his Roden Crater project, a continuing excavation and reconfiguration of a volcanic crater in the Arizona desert, which he is sculpting and interpolating with a series of chambers and passageways linked to the movement of the celestial bodies.
