F
1957
Temple Emanu-El, Dallas

György Kepes commissioned Albers to design a covering for the five-meter-high opening of the ark in the capacious new synagogue seating 3,000. Rather than traditional curtains that would be drawn back to reveal the Torah scrolls, Albers designed eight sliding panels, each covered with machine-woven fabric in blocks of gold, green, blue, and silver Lurex thread, in one long single repeat. An ingenious modular structure created a dynamic composition through the staggered arrangement of the colour blocks and the inversion of the two centre panels. The colours echoed the tones of Kepes’s stained-glass windows. Albers’s economic design included extra lengths of the fabric to be used for future replacement or repairs, and a separate silver fabric to line the interior of the ark.