Danish studio Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects have revealed the first design details of their collaboration with American artist James Turrell on a major expansion of the ARos Aarhus Art Museum.

The €40m expansion plan, called Next Level, will add a 1,200sq m underground gallery and a gigantic semi-subterranean Turrell art installation called The Dome.

Visitors will face “an experience in colour and light” as they travel through a string of galleries and exhibition spaces, stretching almost 120m below the surface to the Dome structure. Wth its 40m diameter, the architects say the Dome will form “one of the most spectacular spaces ever built into an art museum.”

The project is designed to merge art and architecture into a new civic experience. Schmidt Hammer Lassen are the original designers of the museum,which opened in 2004, and worked with Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson in 2011 to build Your Rainbow Panorama; a permanent artwork on the building’s roof hovering like a luminous circle.

From the outside, The Next Level is extending perpendicularly from ARoS's current main entrance to the forecourt of the neighbouring 'Officerspladsen' square. The Dome will rise nine metres above ground level, while the first two underground galleries are almost completely hidden.

James Turrell is one of the world's leading artists working with light and colors with permanent installations in over 26 countries. He creates three-dimensional light paintings, where “he connects the earthly with the heavenly and body and sense with the mind and thought.”

The Next Level is his biggest project within a museum context. It will open for the public in 2020.