Schechter Day School Multi-purpose Room

The design challenge in this multi-purpose room for the Solomon Schechter Day School of Newton, MA, was to have a dedicated worship space while taking up no permanent floor space. The solution was to define the bimah with an overhead sculpted tree of life and to inset the ark in the wall. The two-sided reader’s table is lightweight for movability.

The downward light from the cast bronze Ner Tamid interacts with a slowly rotating upwardly-directed light from from below, creating a subtle, ever-shifting pattern that evokes the interaction of the worldly realm with the light of the Shekhinah.