In 1964 the collectors Dominique and John de Menil commissioned a series of paintings from Mark Rothko for a Roman Catholic chapel in Houston. As the project advanced Rothko also designed the space itself, working with the architect Philip Johnson (and after him Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry) to create an octagonal room with uniform white walls and a single skylight. The chapel opened in 1971 — the year after Rothko's death in February 1970.

Inside, fourteen large canvases cover the walls. Three are purple-black tonal triptychs; the rest, seven squares and four rectangles of black. At first glance they all look black; minute by minute as the eye adjusts, layers of purple, brown, and violet begin to vibrate beneath. They are the opposite of the cloud-like rectangles Rothko developed in the 1950s — but the same logic taken to its outer limit.

The space is ecumenical: it carries no symbol of any single religion. Meditation is practised there, hymns are sung, and dedications across three faiths have taken place; the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela have all visited. In front, in the centre of a rectangular reflecting pool, stands Barnett Newman's sculpture *Broken Obelisk*, dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr.

Rothko took his own life in his New York studio on 25 February 1970, before the chapel opened. The paintings are not deliberately dark enough to push into depression; they belong instead to a rare class of modern works that 'open up the more you look'. The chapel was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 2000, and was thoroughly restored by the Architecture Research Office in 2020-21.