ARoS the Next Level

ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, one of Northern Europe’s largest and most frequently visited art institutions, has embarked on a subterranean expansion that reimagines the modern art museum experience.

In close collaboration with world-renowned artist James Turrell, Schmidt Hammer Lassen is contributing another spectacular chapter to the museum’s evolution, supporting its ambition to offer extraordinary cultural experiences and rank among some of the most eminent museums in the world.

Alongside Salling Galleriet – a new 1,000 m² subterranean exhibition space for site-specific installation art – the centrepiece, The Dome, will become the largest skyspace in the world within a museum context, further cementing ARoS’s position as a leading exhibition venue in the fields of light, space, and colour.

Since ancient times, the dome has appeared in architecture as a universal symbol, signifying power, the royal city, and a central place of assembly. Architects in both Christian and Muslim countries succeeded in constructing majestic churches and mosques crowned with domes—masterpieces admired for their beauty. Today, The Dome at ARoS, with its 40-metre diameter, will form one of the most spectacular spaces ever incorporated into an art museum.

From the outside, the large scale extension will blend seamlessly into the surrounding city park, continuing the use of clearly defined geometric shapes that characterise the existing museum. While the subterranean Salling Galleriet will be expressed above ground as a large new public square, The Dome will emerge in the landscape as a perfectly round, grass-covered hill rising up to ten metres above the natural terrain, evoking the ancient burial mounds found in the surrounding area.

Conceptually, the original ARoS museum comprises a series of galleries stacked vertically within a square building. A public street cuts through the cube, allowing daylight to enter a central atrium and creating a natural pedestrian connection between two key parts of the city.

The Next Level will offer a completely new journey, contrasting with the museum’s original vertical orientation and movement. The extension comprises a long, sweeping horizontal passage that leads visitors below ground to the newly opened Salling Galleriet, and onward to the centrepiece of the extension: the monumental Skyspace by James Turrell.

Visitors ascend via a spiral staircase from the basement, passing through the museum levels and galleries to the roof, where Olafur Eliasson’s masterpiece Your Rainbow Panorama has become both an icon and a landmark of the city.
The space has a raw, industrial aesthetic with exposed fixtures and a deliberate interplay between the rough and the refined, alternating between bare and painted surfaces. Here, sound, light, and spatial perception merge into a harmonious whole, creating a unique sensory atmosphere at the intersection of architecture and art. At the same time, the Salling Gallery also serves as the entrance to The Dome, the next major, and final, phase of the extension.