Menil Collection: Byzantine Fresco Chapel

The Rothko Chapel just happened to be closed for an hour-long private memorial service when we got there -- darn! -- so we went first to something called the Byzantine Fresco Chapel. Like with the Dan Flavin thing, we didn't really know what to expect.

Well, I was blown-away. The top photo's one that I snuck, but it doesn't really do it justice. The walls of the building itself are concrete, but there is a separate black box inside that's suspended from the ceiling and comes down to about eight feet above the ground, with a one-foot gap between it and the concrete shell. Light streams down through this gap, leaving the edges of the room luminescent. The black box, meanwhile, makes the "chapel" in the center of the room seem to float in infinite space. The effect is terribly striking in person.

I put "chapel" in quotes because it's really a deconstructed chapel, sort of an idea of a chapel rather than anything corporeal. Glass panels held up with black brackets that disappear into the blackness of the enveloping walls hint at the architecture of a conventional chapel yet transcend it. The minimalism of the space makes it deeply spiritual -- kind of like Zen temples in Kyoto (which I like for the same reason). It is a place, in short, where even atheists can find religion.

I should definitely mention that the whole point of the chapel is to house a number of Byzantine fresco fragments from an old chapel in the Turkish part of Cyprus (which I've been to!) that were on the verge of being sold on the black market. The Menil Foundation recovered them, and the architect son of the Menils, Francois, designed the structure to showcase them and "return them to their original spirituality."

Mission accomplished, I say.