James Turrell gave me extremely precise instructions. After dinner, I was to walk out through the grounds at Houghton Hall to the skyspace he has built. Here I should observe the gradual darkening above as brightness fell from the Norfolk air. At 9.40 p.m., I was to join him and the Marquess of Cholmondeley to witness the illumination Turrell has devised for the west front of the house.
So we stood in the chill air of an English summer evening and watched as a slowly changing sequence of pinks, mauves, blues and reds lit up the colonnades and Palladian windows designed in the 1720s by Colen Campbell and the domes added by James Gibbs. ‘I feel,’ Turrell remarked, ‘that buildings often have a workaday aspect that you see during the daylight hours, and a more resplendent side that emerges after dark.’
‘Resplendent’ is certainly an apt word for the metamorphosis he has worked at Houghton.
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