CURRENT EXHIBIT • ARTIST PATIO
Night Chapel
A traveling sacred structure created by spatial designer, Michael Bennett
"Seattle’s progressive design culture, environmental consciousness, and diverse communities make it the perfect first location. This project is about healing, mobility, and designing for the world we want to live in.”
- Michael Bennett
About the Exhibit
This exhibit is a traveling sacred structure created by spatial designer and former NFL player Michael Bennett in partnership with Studio Kër.
Built entirely from Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT), this mobile chapel reimagines what it means to create a sacred space. It is not fixed or exclusive. It is alive, inclusive, and restorative. Night Chapel carries beauty, reflection, and connection directly into communities, especially those that are underserved and most vulnerable to the climate crisis.
As the first project of Bennett’s Building Motions initiative, Night Chapel places mental health, community healing, and spatial justice at its very center. Inside, visitors are welcomed into free programs that include workshops, cultural celebrations, meaningful conversations, and moments of quiet reflection.
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.
About Michael Bennett
Michael Bennett is an interdisciplinary designer whose works foster empathy, harmony, congregation, and connection. Guided by his ancestral roots, the objects and spaces he creates are deeply embedded in the experiences and traditions of the African diaspora. Inspired by a sense of community and the Senegalese and Haitian customs of oral storytelling, Bennett’s works are rich with narrative, living repositories that invite cultural dialogue and intimate conversations.
Celebrating history, storytelling, and craftsmanship, he explores form and language across various spatial scales, utilizing sculpture, architecture, and furniture design to communicate through space. His work is rooted in the ideas of place and community through references to historically Black cultural motifs and object-histories, consciously challenging dominant Western domestic codes.
A former NFL player and Super Bowl champion, Bennett studied at the Heritage School of Design in Seattle and the University of Hawaii’s School of Architecture, where he focused on the reclamation of public space through the study of spatial theory and architectural typologies. Based in Hawaii, he founded his atelier, Studio Kër, in 2024. An activist and bestselling author, Bennett advocates for numerous causes and organizations across the globe, including an endowment for students from low-income homes at the Rhode Island School of Design.