An Architectural Chuppah For Immediate Release: September 13, 2004 If you travel east from Manhattan out onto Long Island, and don’t stop until “The End,” then you will find yourself on a peninsula of beauty and inspiration: Montauk. Enshrouded by a blanket of sunny beaches spread out into the undulating surf of the Atlantic Ocean, the water creates a current of sound and luminosity which sinks deeply into the body and mind. This is where Matt Dockery and Esther Kardos have enjoyed their weekends for the last two summers, and the place where they got married last Labor Day weekend.

Matt Dockery and Esther Kardos are both Architects and accordingly, their wedding was designed with all the care and patience of their art. But it was not just their mutual love of art and design which gave their wedding such a distinctive spirit; their religious and cultural backgrounds also contributed to the beauty of their wedding.

Esther is Jewish and was born in Germany, and Matt is of English and Irish Decent, and was raised Irish Catholic. The couple met in New York City while they were both working for the renowned American Architect and designer, Michael Graves.

Someone commented toward the end of the reception that, “The Irish seem to have a natural ability to Horah.” I would go one step further: The traditional festive Jewish dances on Montauk that evening took on an entirely new character; the combination of cultures, the presence of the ocean, the sounds of the Reggae band, and the energy of the friends who came from as far away as Hungary, China, and Kuwait, created a festive atmosphere as distinctive as a the shape of a billowing cloud and as seductive as love’s first kiss.

Their pride in their own distinctive cultural backgrounds and their respect and admiration for each others’ religious identities, as well as their mutual love of architecture, fused Matt and Esther together in life and in marriage; and the same forces and passions also lead them to commission a unique custom chuppah for their wedding.

Matt and Esther met with artist and architectural designer Roy Kushner, to discuss their desire to have a unique chuppah for their wedding; one that blended traditional usage with their own aesthetic tastes and values. Matt expressed his interest in a simple geometry of form and function, while Esther articulated her desire for a floating canopy in the shape of a peaked roofline. Since the wedding was to be on the beach just yards from the crashing surf, and with the potential for gusting winds, Kushner designed four modular, interlocking, wooden platforms which would receive the chuppah’s four corner posts; the geometry of the platform’s pinwheeling plan left a small square of sand exposed at the center where a small round glass table would be installed.

“We conceived of the chuppah as a kind of architectural frame with a canopy floating inside,” Kushner recalls. “I designed a rigid structure of steel tubing, and then worked with Esther and Matt to come up with a tensile cable system which would support the fabric canopy.” The combination of materials and textures was sublime; and on the day of the wedding the winds gusted to nearly 25 miles per hour, allowing the frame and the fabric to reveal not only their beauty but also their tremendous strength and flexibility; the foundation for any successful marriage. “After the wedding, it stood all night, until we took it down the next day,” remembered Esther, “And when we came to take it apart there were some people using the platform, and the shade the canopy provided, to do yoga on the beach.”

The metal frame will be recycled by Kushner into several pieces of modern furniture for the married couple. They have requested a bed frame and a coffee table made of their chuppah, as a way to integrate the symbolism of the chuppah and its ancient tradition into the tapestry of their everyday lives.