Roden Crater is an architecture piece designed by James Turrell.

The whole structure is built within an extinct volcano in Arizona, including multiple rooms, chambers and tunnels.

Roden Crater is a space that expands the boundaries of the work to encompass the entire universe. It’s not merely an art piece inspired by the solar system; rather, it draws all astronomical objects into this small space (relative to the vastness of the universe), making the audience acutely aware that we are "in" the universe. The sky is not out there, nor up there, but surrounding and enveloping us every second.

To achieve this artistic goal, James Turrell uses artificial lighting to highlight the presence of natural light. He employs several techniques to achieve this.

The first approach involves adjusting the lighting in response to the changes in natural light throughout the day. In the morning, when natural light is bright, a cooler, relatively dimmer light is used. In contrast, as night falls, warmer, richer lighting is employed, ensuring that the overall lighting remains balanced and continually emphasizes the presence of the sky.

Second is to visually flatten the structure of the opening window, so that instead of looking like “it’s out there ”, the sky looks like part of the room. This is achieved by using an arc-shaped soft light that surrounds the entire space and shines toward the ceiling to counteract the feeling of nature light "entering" through the opening. The presence of the sky and natural light is flattened, eliminating the sense of an unreachable "dome." With this approach, it creates the sensation that one can step into the sky.tly, this project played with the transition between artificial and nature light. In the alpha east tunnel below, the beginning of the tunnel is strongly lighted, but the brightness decrease as walking toward the end, and transits slowly from artificial light to nature light coming from the opening in the end

Lastly, this project explores the transition between artificial and natural light. In the Alpha East Tunnel below, the entrance is brightly lit, but the brightness gradually decreases as you move toward the end. The lighting slowly transitions from artificial light to natural light, which enters through the opening at the far end.