Textile Tabernacle is a deployable fabric-and-frame structure. In reference to its deeply-rooted tradition, it provides portable sanctuary in memory of the ‘period of wandering’. It is a space for meditation, contemplation, wonder, stillness and reflection. It is a temporary shelter for the body - the human instance of the spirit - which in turn is the temporary abode of the soul. It is a threshold to an ever-present but under-accessed reality, the ephemeral beyond the world of appearances.
Textile Tabernacle is able to be transported, assembled and erected wherever there is a need. The structural frame allows for its skinning to be flexible in its application. The experience of the space changes continuously in the light, as well as dynamically in the act of moving through it. Slipping between its exterior layers, one enters a luminous, organic form that allows the exterior world to dissolve and recede. If a space is dematerialized, the occupant loses his sense of place, he loses his sense of body. Then one can focus on the mind.
The internal bounds of the space becomes a psychological space of the mind. The space creates a suspension of one’s sense of place and a detachment from the exterior environment. By employing diaphonous, opaque, translucent fabrics, the edges of the space are blurred, which suspends a sense of place, and allows the world of objects to dissolve and recede ina space free from ordinary frames of reference.
The project was completed in collaboration with Michael Yarinsky, Carla Lores and Kate Moxham, under studio professors Mark Parsons and Dragana Zoric at Pratt Institute in the fall of 2009.