Above Horizon, Goldstein Skyspace
Architectoid · Sheats-Goldstein Residence · Beverly Hills
Above Horizon
The Goldstein Skyspace · James Turrell & Duncan Nicholson · 2004
Above Horizon, exterior view. Concrete shell structure on a steep Beverly Hills hillside.
Every great building raises a question. The Goldstein Skyspace — formally titled Above Horizon — raises one of the most fundamental questions architecture can pose: what do you actually see when you look at the sky? The answer, it turns out, is not what you assumed.
The project began as a collaboration that was not to be. John Lautner — who had designed the original Sheats-Goldstein Residence in 1963 and continued refining it across four decades — was the natural architect for owner James Goldstein's vision of a light installation in collaboration with artist James Turrell. Lautner passed away in 1994 before the project could be realized. His apprentice, architect Duncan Nicholson, stepped into the architect's role and completed the work in partnership with Turrell. The Skyspace opened in 2004.
Site & Construction
The site itself made few concessions to its builders. Positioned on a steep Beverly Hills hillside within the Goldstein property — far from any adjacent road — the logistics of construction presented a significant challenge for contractor Bruce Ostermann and Nicholson. The solution was a concrete shell structure set on a caisson foundation, engineered by Andrew Nasser. The choice of concrete was deliberate on two counts: durability, and material continuity with the Lautner residence below, which had established the grammar of board-formed concrete as a finish material on the site since 1963.
Interior view showing the central oculus and smooth white plaster finish.
The Experience
The room operates through two operable openings: a central oculus in the ceiling, and a corner window. Beneath the concrete pebble-finish floor, radiant heating keeps the space comfortable through a dawn or dusk show. The walls — smooth white plaster — serve as the primary instrument of the piece.
Concealed in alcoves around the perimeter are 5,000 LEDs, never directly visible to a viewer seated in the room. When activated, they wash the walls in color rather than the eye — the room itself becomes saturated rather than lit. Turrell has pre-programmed a sequence of transitioning colors timed to the changing light quality of dawn and dusk, centering the viewer's attention on the rectangle of open sky framed by the oculus.
The Turrell effect in sequence: LED color wash against the sky frame.
Show sequence stills. The programming runs at dawn and dusk throughout the year.
What you assumed was a neutral and constant fact — the color of the sky — is revealed as a perception constructed by context. The room is the instrument. The sky is the material.
That is the essential move Turrell makes in every Skyspace: the viewer's prior certainties about visual experience are destabilized not through spectacle but through stillness. As the LED sequence shifts and the visible patch of sky appears to change color before your eyes, you understand — viscerally rather than intellectually — that what you have always called "the color of the sky" was never fixed. It was always a relational perception, shaped by the light surrounding it. The room makes the invisible argument visible.
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