Night Chapel is a timber reimagining of religious institutional architecture transformed into a connective spiritual practice. Created by Michael Bennett in collaboration with Studio Kër, the installation offers sacred space for healing, reflection, and communal presence, deeply rooted in the lived experience and wisdom of the African diaspora. Night Chapel is currently on exhibit at Seattle’s Northwest African American Museum (NAAM) through the end of the month.
I find myself referring to Bennett’s work as an inversion. In most Christian traditions, the wooden cross is placed inside an enclosed church building—often constructed of brick or stone, fixed in place, and owned by an institution. The cross becomes something protected, contained, and, at times, separated from the wider world. Bennett’s vision disrupts this pattern. Here, the cross does not sit quietly within walls; it tears open enclosure itself. The structure opens outward, collapsing the boundary between interior and exterior, between “sacred space” and all of creation. What emerges is not only an object to behold, but a place to gather, connect, and be held.
As the exhibit description on NAAM’s website puts it:
“As the first project of Bennett’s Building Motions initiative, Night Chapel places mental health, community healing, and spatial justice at its very center… Night Chapel is more than a structure. It is a call to gather. It is an offering of care. It is a space where community and belonging can flourish.”
That language matters. This is not architecture as monument or mastery, but architecture as presence and practice—space designed not to dominate, but to listen.
Bennett echoes this sensibility in his own words:
“I believe architecture can hold more than walls and roofs. 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.”
In a moment when religious institutions are often experienced as exclusionary or brittle, Night Chapel gestures toward another possibility: sacred space as open, porous, and reparative. It invites us to imagine how faith, design, and justice might meet not in control, but in care.
Michael Bennett is an interdisciplinary designer, activist, author of Things That Make White People Feel Uncomfortable, and a former Super Bowl champion, Pro Bowl Seattle Seahawk player. Night Chapel is well worth your time and attention.
Check it out.
Peace, dwight
