As a prominent cultural institution, ARoS is constantly developing to both reflect and address present societal challenges. The Next Level is the expansion project developed in collaboration with the American artist James Turrell.
The expansion will contain a 1000 m² subterranean gallery and The Dome - a semisubterranean art installation.
James Turrell is one of the world's leading artists working with light, colours and art installations with permanent installations in over 26 countries. His works have the common feature that they embrace the audience through light and colour effects controlled by the artist. Turrell’s often colourful room installations are reminiscent of three-dimensional light paintings, where he connects the earthly with the heavenly and body and sense with the mind and thought. The Next Level is his biggest project within a museum context.
ARoS - The Next Level
An Evolving Cultural Heart
ARoS Aarhus Art Museum is a significant cultural beacon in Aarhus, Denmark. To uphold its appeal, pertinence, and integrity, the museum is constantly evolving to reflect the technological, economical, and social changes occurring both locally and globally.
Art is a medium that not only mirrors, influences, and challenges established norms, but also draws inspiration from them. Thus, art and societal changes are intricately linked, and leading art museums such as ARoS have a crucial role in fostering and directing this relationship. This involves not only shaping their programmes and exhibitions but also providing physical spaces that stimulate and showcase this dialogue effectively.
ARoS – The Next Level takes visitors on a sensuous horizontal journey through a subterranean gallery that opens to the monumental art installation and Skyspace, The Dome, by American artists James Turrell.
As many of ARoS’ existing exhibition spaces are located fully or partially below ground, the subterranean gallery and The Dome may on one hand appear like a natural extension, while on the other it presents a unique approach to the curation of art, light, and space to offer an astonishing experience and encourage public engagement.
It is the continuous dialogue between ARoS Aarhus Art Museum and Schmidt Hammer Lassen which laid the ground for the development and visualisation of ARoS – The Next Level. The Dome is undeniably the centrepiece that, together with the subterranean gallery, merges art and architecture into a new civic and accessible experience.
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The Dome will become the largest Turrell´s Skyspace in the world within a museum context, and further cement ARoS’ position as leading exhibition venue in the field of light, space, and colour.
For over half a century, James Turrell has worked directly with light and space to create artworks that engage viewers with the limits and wonder of human perception.
My work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing. I’m also interested in the sense of presence of space; that is space where you feel a presence, almost an entity — that physical feeling and power that space can give.
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- Location:
- Aarhus, Denmark
- Programme:
- Art museum
- Size:
- 4,000 m²
- Status:
- Ongoing
- Client:
- Aarhus Municipality, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum
- Client consultant:
- Kuben Management A/S
- Competition:
- Direct commission
- Engineer & subconsultant:
- COWI A/S
- Artist collaboration:
- James Turrell (US)
- Landscape architect:
- Schmidt Hammer Lassen
- Contractor:
- Per Aarsleff A/S
- Renders:
- B&B, FORBESMASSIE, Schmidt Hammer Lassen
- Photos:
- Mads Smidstrup ©ARoS 2025
ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, one of Northern Europe’s largest and most frequently visited art institutions, has embarked on a subterranean expansion that reimagines the modern art museum experience.
In close collaboration with world-renowned artist James Turrell, Schmidt Hammer Lassen is contributing another spectacular chapter to the museum’s evolution, supporting its ambition to offer extraordinary cultural experiences and rank among some of the most eminent museums in the world.
Alongside Salling Galleriet – a new 1,000 m² subterranean exhibition space for site-specific installation art – the centrepiece, The Dome, will become the largest skyspace in the world within a museum context, further cementing ARoS’s position as a leading exhibition venue in the fields of light, space, and colour.
Since ancient times, the dome has appeared in architecture as a universal symbol, signifying power, the royal city, and a central place of assembly. Architects in both Christian and Muslim countries succeeded in constructing majestic churches and mosques crowned with domes—masterpieces admired for their beauty. Today, The Dome at ARoS, with its 40-metre diameter, will form one of the most spectacular spaces ever incorporated into an art museum.
From the outside, the large scale extension will blend seamlessly into the surrounding city park, continuing the use of clearly defined geometric shapes that characterise the existing museum. While the subterranean Salling Galleriet will be expressed above ground as a large new public square, The Dome will emerge in the landscape as a perfectly round, grass-covered hill rising up to ten metres above the natural terrain, evoking the ancient burial mounds found in the surrounding area.
Conceptually, the original ARoS museum comprises a series of galleries stacked vertically within a square building. A public street cuts through the cube, allowing daylight to enter a central atrium and creating a natural pedestrian connection between two key parts of the city.
The Next Level will offer a completely new journey, contrasting with the museum’s original vertical orientation and movement. The extension comprises a long, sweeping horizontal passage that leads visitors below ground to the newly opened Salling Galleriet, and onward to the centrepiece of the extension: the monumental Skyspace by James Turrell.
Visitors ascend via a spiral staircase from the basement, passing through the museum levels and galleries to the roof, where Olafur Eliasson’s masterpiece Your Rainbow Panorama has become both an icon and a landmark of the city.
Salling Galleriet, der blev indviet i sommeren 2025, markerer første fase af The Next Level. Det 1.000 m² store udstillingsrum er skabt til stedsspecifikke installationer, performance og eksperimenterende kunstpraksisser.
The space has a raw, industrial aesthetic with exposed fixtures and a deliberate interplay between the rough and the refined, alternating between bare and painted surfaces. Here, sound, light, and spatial perception merge into a harmonious whole, creating a unique sensory atmosphere at the intersection of architecture and art. At the same time, the Salling Gallery also serves as the entrance to The Dome, the next major, and final, phase of the extension.
The Next Level expansion project is leading art towards new ways of expressions and content that will merge art and architecture into a new civic experience.
