Re-scaling Turrell's Celestial Vault and Gaillard's Dunepark

18 May - 20 September 2015
Location: window
Stroom, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Open: day and night from the street


Stroom Den Haag was founded in 1990 and over the past 25 years has realized a number of large-scale art projects in The Hague's public space. Graphic designer Tereza Ruller (The Rodina) recently immersed herself in the Stroom archives and created this presentation of two highly contrasting works of landscape art, that on closer inspection also appear to have a number of similarities. One work (James Turrell's 'Celestial Vault') turns itself upwards, towards the light and the clouds in the sky above our heads; the other work (Cyprien Gaillard's 'Dunepark') emerged from the darkness underground, and for a short period of time literally brought to light the darkest period in our country's history.

James Turrell - 'Celestial Vault'
1996 - present
Location: Machiel Vrijenhoeklaan 175, Kijkduin


The idea to invite James Turrell for a large-scale work of art first occurred when Stroom participated in the preparations for the International Conference of Landscape Architecture (IFLA), held in The Hague in 1992. The theme of this conference was the relationship between landscape and visual arts. Turrell came up with the idea to create an artificial crater. The scale of the original plan was so grand that no one believed it would ever be realized, in whatever shape or form.

Yet, with great perseverance, the project was completed in 1996. In the dunes of The Hague, where light can have such a tangible presence, James Turrell created a place to look at the sky: the ‘Celestial Vault' in Kijkduin.

At the top of one of the rubble dunes, a bowl in the shape of an ellipse has been built, 30 meters wide and 40 meters long. A wall of earth, approximately 5 meters high, encloses the bowl. In order to reach this artificial crater you first have to climb up the dune on a long, wooden stairway and then walk through a six-meter long concrete passageway. The slopes on the inside of the crater have been sown with grass and in the middle of the crater stands a monumental natural stone bench on which two people can lie back and observe how the sky takes the shape of a celestial vault. A similar bench is located on a higher dune where a panorama unfolds over the sea, the beach and the flat countryside beyond.

Cyprien Gaillard 'Dunepark'
Bunker project*
21 February - 29 March 2009


Stroom Den Haag commissioned the French artist Cyprien Gaillard to realize a site-specific project in Duindorp. For ‘Dunepark' a World War II bunker, buried in a hill overlooking the beach of Scheveningen and the neighbourhood of Duindorp, was temporarily excavated.

At the time the area was undergoing drastic transformation as the existing communities and industries were displaced to make way for new housing developments. Gaillard's project commented obliquely on this process of gentrification and the way in which outmoded architecture is buried or hidden beneath new layers of urban development.

‘Dunepark' can be seen as the embodiment of the ‘Bunker Archeology' carried out by the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio in his eponymous 1975 book and exhibition. For Gaillard, the physical process of excavating was a form of negative sculpting. He sees this submerged bunker as a buried ready-made sculpture. With the help of heavy earth-moving equipment and a group of volunteers of the Stichting Atlantikwall Museum Scheveningen, Gaillard dug out this massive form to reveal it in all its brutalist glory, before covering it up once more. In the short time the bunker was exposed to broad daylight, the place adopted the function of a storytelling machine. Memories and fantasies were shared and passed on by the local population and came into the world through this work.

Location: Bosjes van Poot, corner Nieboerweg - Houtrustweg in Scheveningen
* The bunker itself was not open to the public.

Tereza Ruller, 'Re-scaling Turrell's Celestial Vault'
photo: The Rodina
Tereza Ruller, 'Re-scaling Turrell's Celestial Vault'
photo: The Rodina
Tereza Ruller, 'Re-scaling Turrell's Celestial Vault'
photo: The Rodina
Tereza Ruller, 'Re-scaling Turrell's Celestial Vault'
photo: design: The Rodina
Tereza Ruller, 'Re-scaling Gaillard's Dunepark'
photo: design: The Rodina
James Turrell, 'Hemels Gewelf', 1996-heden
photo: Gerrit Schreurs, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Cyprien Gaillard, Dunepark, 2009
photo: Stroom Den Haag