The Man Who Bought a Volcano to Watch the Sky

The Man Behind the Mountain

James Turrell is not a normal artist. Born in 1943 in Los Angeles, he grew up in a Quaker family where silence was sacred — Quaker meetings are built around sitting in stillness and waiting for the light. His grandmother told him: “Go inside and greet the light.” He took it literally.

He earned a pilot’s license at 16. During the Vietnam War, he registered as a conscientious objector — and flew Buddhist monks out of Chinese-controlled Tibet instead. He studied perceptual psychology at Pomona College (B.A., 1965) before getting his MFA in art from Claremont Graduate School in 1973.

The psychology degree matters. Turrell doesn’t make art about light. He makes art from light. He’s spent his career studying how the human eye and brain construct reality — how what we see is not what’s there, but what our perceptual system decides to show us. His medium isn’t paint or stone. It’s the raw material of vision itself.

In 1966, he moved into the old Mendota Hotel in Ocean Park, California, and began experimenting with projected light and controlled apertures — cutting holes in walls and ceilings to frame the sky, then carefully controlling the interior light levels so the sky appeared to be a flat, painted surface rather than an infinite void. People would reach out to touch it, convinced it was a canvas.

Finding the Crater

By the mid-1970s, Turrell had outgrown hotel rooms. He wanted something bigger. Something permanent. Something that would take the sky and hold it.

He began searching for the perfect natural formation — a place with pristine dark skies, high altitude, and a concave shape that could frame the celestial dome. He flew over the American Southwest in his small plane, surveying volcanic fields and canyons.

In the early 1970s, he spent the night in the bowl of an extinct cinder cone in northern Arizona’s Painted Desert, about 50 miles northeast of Flagstaff. The crater was roughly 400,000 years old, about 3 miles across. The surrounding desert was essentially untouched — no light pollution, no development, no civilization for miles. The sky above was one of the darkest remaining in the continental United States.

He had found it. In 1977, Turrell acquired the land. He has never left.

Carving Light

What Turrell has done to the crater over the past five decades is staggering in both ambition and patience.

He moved 1.3 million cubic yards of earth — reshaping the interior of the crater bowl, cutting tunnels through the volcanic rock, carving precise apertures that frame specific celestial events. The longest tunnel, the Alpha (East) Tunnel, stretches 854 feet (260 meters) into the crater.

The tunnels and chambers are not random. Each one is engineered to capture specific light at specific times. The Sun & Moon Chamber frames both the sun and moon at precise moments. The Crater’s Eye — the natural bowl of the crater itself — has been reshaped into an elliptical amphitheater of sky. Some spaces are designed to be most accurate in about 2,000 years, accounting for the slow drift of Earth’s axial precession.

When complete, the project will contain 24 viewing spaces and six tunnels. Each space is a controlled environment for experiencing and contemplating light — where the cycles of geologic and celestial time can be directly perceived.

The Spaces

The completed spaces are individually remarkable. Together, they form a cathedral of light carved from an extinct volcano.

Why It Matters

Roden Crater occupies a strange position in the art world. It is simultaneously:

• A work of land art on the scale of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty or Michael Heizer’s City
• A functioning observatory for naked-eye astronomy
• A perceptual psychology experiment disguised as architecture
• A meditation on deep time — built to last centuries, optimized for millennia
• An act of stubbornness so extreme it borders on something spiritual

There is nothing else like it. Ancient peoples built observatories — Stonehenge, Chichén Itzá, Angkor Wat — but always as communal, religious structures. Turrell has built one as a personal artistic statement, funded by grants, donations, and Kanye West.

The Dia Art Foundation calls it “a controlled environment for the experiencing and contemplation of light.” The official site describes it as “more akin to the communally developed sites of ancient Incas, than to the conceptions of any individual one can think of in modern times.”

Only a tiny number of people have ever been inside. The crater is closed to the public. Fundraising continues. Construction continues. Turrell, now in his early 80s, continues.