Daniel Buren's 'Observatory of Light'

The most distinctive feature of the Gehry building that opened to the public in October 2014 is surely the twelve sails, which are made up of 3,600 panes and have a total surface area of 13,500 square meters. These sails are held up by wood beams to wrap the solid volumes of the museum and give the building its defining expression, while creating a variety of in-between spaces filled with stairs and terraces. Buren's installation activates these interstitial spaces by casting colorful shadows from the glass sails onto the fiber-reinforced concrete surfaces beneath.

As the artist sees it, "The terraces, as Gehry has created them, are what make the museum original. They are not positioned as they usually are at the top of the building but wrapped around it, winding around the closed spaces. A bit like utopian architecture ..." In turn Buren concludes, "I can’t see myself being offered another space as extraordinary as this one any time soon. If I were offered a similar place, in fact, I would stop. Here it’s so particular that it’s a joy to carry out this transformation of the architecture by means of the positioning of color."