Where traditional chapels have often served as immovable markers of faith, Night Chapel, an installation by Michael Bennett, responds to a different theology of space, one rooted in motion, in resilience, and in the traditions of the African diaspora. In the fading light of an autumn evening, the chapel’s timber walls catch the last sun, their surfaces casting long shadows that stretch across the ground. As dusk deepens, its slatted surfaces turn from luminous to dark, a structure shifting with the say, neither fixed nor monumental, but responding to time, light, and weather.
Designed by Bennett—spatial designer, activist, and former NFL player—through his practice Studio Kër, in collaboration with Seattle’s Northwest African American Museum (NAAM), Night Chapel is constructed entirely from cross-laminated timber (CLT) and is not bound to a permanent foundation. Instead, it will be assembled, disassembled, and reassembled across sites in Seattle through October, carrying with it community-led programming that treats the sacred not as static, but as mobile and shared.
“I believe architecture can hold more than walls and roofs,” Bennett said on Instagram. “It can carry memory, hold grief, invite joy, and offer a place for people to come back to themselves. Night Chapel is designed to listen as much as it speaks, to be present as much as it is built.”
Its form suggests both sculpture and shelter, a place that accommodates ceremony and conversation, quiet reflection and collective gathering. By situating sacredness in the ability to adapt, the project hopes to rethink architecture’s role in spiritual life, framing it not as an enclosure for ritual but as a catalyst for healing.
The choice of CLT is more than structural. As a material that sequesters carbon, it embodies an ecological ethic while drawing architecture closer to nature. It is a material both of the forest and of the future. Within this chapel, the wood shapes a space where light and shadow play across its surfaces, turning the building into a living register of time’s passage.
Backed by the Seattle Seahawks, Captions of Change, and the Softwood Lumber Board, Night Chapel operates at the threshold of architecture and religion. Visitors become participants, co-authors of a space that hosts workshops, conversations, and ceremonies alongside solitude. In this sense, the chapel gestures to the origins of religious architecture, as spaces that first gathered people under shelter, open to the elements, shifting with need, centered on collective life.
For Bennett, who founded Studio Kër in 2020, the project is an attempt to reconcile memory, diaspora, and design. Trained in both architectural theory and craft, he draws on African diasporic forms to produce structures that are neither whole building nor wholly artifact, works that hold presence and carry history. Night Chapel, in its impermanence and openness, insists that the scared can be both rooted and moving.
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