For 49 years, the skylight was never quite right.
It was a nagging distraction at the Rothko Chapel, where it loomed overhead at the center of the octagonal room whose walls hold 14 huge, dark paintings that artist Mark Rothko created specifically for the space. The goal was to offer visitors a spiritual encounter with art.
Commissioned by patrons John and Dominique de Menil, the nondenominational chapel was originally designed by Philip Johnson; Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry, FAIA, finished the project as architects-of-record. The 3,830-square-foot sacred space, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, doubles as a forum for programs on social justice and human rights. After opening in 1971, it quickly became a revered cultural landmark—even as its skylight underperformed.
First the space was too bright. The Texas sun blasted through the original transparent skylight, obliterating the vision of dusky paintings brushed by soft daylight that had been sought by the artist, who died in 1970, prior to the chapel’s opening. Attempts to remedy the situation fell short. In 1974, conservators tried to control the light by rigging up a translucent fabric “diaper” below the skylight; in 1976, they tried a baffle that deflected light. In 1999, conservators plugged the skylight from below with a larger baffle that made the room feel smaller and darker, and that reflected glaring daylight onto the popcorn plaster ceiling. The skylight needed a total redesign.
In anticipation of the chapel’s 50th anniversary, New York–based Architecture Research Office teamed with Washington, D.C.–based lighting design firm George Sexton Associates were commissioned to restore and overhaul the project as part of an ongoing $30 million campus plan by ARO. By designing a new skylight and diffuser assembly, the team has finally achieved Rothko’s intent for the chapel interior. “We focused on shaping the space with light,” says ARO principal Stephen Cassell, FAIA. “Now visitors can focus on the paintings.”
A new entrance vestibule helps visitors’ eyes adjust as they enter the chapel from a tree-shaded path. The vestibule is dark, so the chapel’s wan light provides a comparative lift. At the heart of this meditative space is the revamped octagonal oculus.
Measuring 19’7” across, the new skylight comprises aluminum framing with three light-diffusing layers. The outermost is a weather-tight enclosure of diffusing, insulated glass. Then comes the project’s secret marvel: a finely tuned honeycomb of stationary louvers that funnels light to the chapel walls, illuminating the paintings from top to bottom, even as the sun crosses the sky. Each of the 280 reflective aluminum blades, divided among eight triangular wedges, is individually angled and spaced to ensure an even distribution of light below.
“The louver system is a subtractive mechanism,” says GSA founding principal George S. Sexton III. “It only lets light through where you want it.” To optimize the louver blades’ positions and color, GSA used digital and physical models. The blades are painted white on their sun-reflecting face to maximize reflectivity, and pale gray on their inward-facing surface to blend with the surrounding gray acoustical plaster ceiling and to bounce just enough light around the room to create a gentle ambiance.
The skylight’s third diffusing layer is a translucent, perforated plastic scrim that camouflages the whole assembly. To Cassell and ARO co-principal Adam Yarinsky, FAIA, who dived into the history of the paintings and the chapel with the artist’s son, Christopher Rothko, the scrim recalls the parachute that Rothko strung up as a homemade diffuser beneath the clerestory windows of his New York studio while he worked on the chapel’s paintings.
In the evening, the chapel interior is illuminated by an equally discreet and well-calibrated system. Eight downward-facing digital projectors, concealed inside the oculus ring wall, beam pools of light onto the walls via oblique mirrors. To preserve the silence, the projectors’ humming fans and cooling system are encased in soundproof insulation. “We wanted to hide anything that would be a distraction, allowing the space and the paintings to come to the fore,” Yarinsky says. The technical ring around the skylight also holds speakers, microphones, and security cameras.
While the Rothko Chapel provides for an intensely intimate experience, it also connects with community groups worldwide and its immediate surroundings, which include a sculpture court featuring Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk, ARO’s new public buildings for the campus, and a Nelson Byrd Woltz–designed landscape that will see tens of thousands of annual visitors. And even in the stillness of the chapel, “the light changes over the course of the day,” Cassell says. “There’s a connection to nature.”
