Skyspace Ta Khut by James Turrell

"It’s 3:30 a.m., just before the sunrise in José Ignacio, Uruguay, the small seaside community largely populated by weekend visitors from neighboring Argentina. Bleary-eyed, I find myself alongside a handful of people filing into a large pyramid-shaped structure called Ta Khut, or 'The Light' in early Egyptian. Its exterior is concealed by grass and plants, and instead of a sharp point, its apex is punctuated by a white sphere, crafted using some 42 tons of small marble bricks. Inside, through a set of heavy Lapacho wood sliding doors, we are met with a granite rotunda in which every whisper and grain of sand beneath the soles of our shoes echoes upward toward a circular hole, bored through the cupola above us to reveal the night sky. We take our seats along the edge of the rotunda as a spectrum of colored lights swell and contract, reflecting onto the building’s cavernous space above. The sun begins to rise, and the sounds outside shift from frogs and crickets to chirping birds, but the crash of waves remains a constant. The rounded piece of sky visible through the hole, 16-feet in diameter, seems to become a tangible object, just out of reach. The clouds dissipate, and the moonlight gives way to radiant beams of morning sunlight. For some, this experience is solely an aesthetic pleasure, for others it offers a moment of deep introspection regarding the scale of human life or the dawn of a new beginning, yet at its core, Ta Khut is a shrine to light." - Zachary Weiss