MISHKÄ€N is a full-service architecture, interiors, planning, and research studio devoted to crafting stories through design.
Originally conceived as a way to reconnect with an ancestral heritage, the practice evolved to design contemporary architecture with a reverence for historic narratives, both real and mythical.
The resultant spaces enrich the moments of everyday life by recalling a shared past, remaining immersed in the present, and striving toward a worthy future.
CHIEF MENSCH + PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT
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Solomon Cohen is a Bukharian Jewish architect and writer. Born in Andijan, Uzbekistan, his family immigrated from the former Soviet Union to Queens, where he grew up. He holds degrees from Temple University in Philadelphia and the University of Washington in Seattle. Now based in Phoenix, he spends the majority of his free time renovating a historic home with his wife, Dena, and their cats, Edison and Tesla.
משכן • MISHKÄ€N [pronounced meesh-kahn] is the Hebrew word for an ordinary dwelling.
As a proper noun, "המשכן” [pronounced ha-meesh-kahn] refers to the Tabernacle, a portable sanctuary carried by the Israelites through the Sinai Peninsula for 40 years as they roamed the desert in search of the promised land.
After the kingdoms were unified under David and Solomon, the Temple was reshaped in stone as the civic and spiritual heart of ancient Jerusalem. The divine center of the nomadic origin story, its innermost recesses were sacred and restricted, accessible to the High Priest alone, just once every year.
Foreign empires later invaded Jerusalem, destroying the Temple and exiling the Jewish natives on two separate occasions. The resultant diaspora carries the memory of the MISHKÄ€N as the holiest space in the Jewish consciousness.
Its recollection, from Exodus to Herzl, has informed the aspirations of wandering peoples for generations, seeking community, return from exile, and reclamation of their ancestral narratives.
Accordingly, the naming of one's temporal earthly dwelling in its memory sets the stage for opposing ideas to converge: text with territory, history with mythology, and home with diaspora.