James Turrell, Light Box

The lobby of 505 Fifth Avenue is not a typical office building entrance — it’s a permanent art installation. James Turrell collaborated with architects Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates to transform the space into a glowing LED environment called “Light Box.”

The collaboration came about organically: KPF’s Douglas Hocking looked at early renderings of the space and thought they evoked a Turrell piece. So Turrell himself was brought in. Using stucco walls as canvas and LED as paint, he created “Plain Dress 2006” — color fields that shift and glow, turning the act of waiting for an elevator into something genuinely surreal. It’s a Rothko you can walk inside, just steps from the sensory overload of Times Square.

Location: James Turrell, Plain Dress 2006, 505 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10036