The Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum (ACSF) is honored to announce that artist James Turrell has been selected for the 2026 ACSF Award for Outstanding Achievement.
James Turrell’s lifelong body of work constitutes one of the most profound, original, and sustained contributions to the understanding of the spiritual dimension of the built environment in contemporary culture. For more than five decades, Turrell has pursued an uncompromising investigation into how architecture — understood as constructed space shaped by light, geometry, orientation, and time — can cultivate conditions for contemplation, transcendence, and existential awareness. His work stands as a singular achievement in revealing how spatial design can function as a primary medium for spiritual experience.
Turrell’s practice is fundamentally architectural in conception, execution, and effect. His installations, “skyspaces,” and earthworks are meticulously designed environments that organize perception itself. His work does not represent spiritual ideas symbolically; rather, it creates the conditions for a direct, embodied encounter with phenomena that have grounded sacred architecture across cultures and history: light, sky, silence, duration, and cosmic order. In this sense, Turrell reclaims and renews architecture’s ancient role as a mediator between human experience and realities that exceed instrumental reason.
Deeply informed by his Quaker background, particularly its emphasis on silence, inward attention, and “inner light,” Turrell’s work remains radically open and inclusive. His spaces welcome individuals across belief systems into experiences of stillness, heightened awareness, and awe. In doing so, Turrell articulates a contemporary spirituality grounded in direct experience rather than representation—an approach that resonates strongly with current interdisciplinary conversations in architecture, phenomenology, theology, psychology, and neuroscience.
Across museums, landscapes, and permanent architectural works worldwide, Turrell has reshaped discourse on light, perception, and sacred space. His influence extends well beyond the art world, informing architects, scholars, and educators concerned with the existential and spiritual dimensions of the built environment. By demonstrating that architecture can still serve humanity’s deepest desires for orientation, meaning, and transcendence, Turrell has made an enduring contribution fully aligned with the mission and values of the Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum, making him a sterling choice for this year’s ACSF Award for Outstanding Achievement. Turrell will receive the award at a public event, with the date to be announced at a later time.
Portrait credit: https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Turrell
