Temple The Temple of the White Cloud is primarily an iconograph -a symbolic statement intended as a contrapuntal argument to its immediate surroundings. The temple is situated in a dense, banal area of the city. It is flanked on both sides by huge, forbidding, Kafkaesque housing developments. Below is one of the world's busiest and most congested highways, along which pass Detroit's latest fantasies. The park below the temple functions as a barrier to the noise and fumes of the traffic below. The temple provides spiritual amenity in an area where it is lacking. The temple is an air-inflated structure. The result is a huge enclosed space, undefined by columns or corners. The inside space thus begins to take on the qualities of an outdoor space. The attempt has been to create a microcosmic environment within this luminous shell, utilizing the typical architectural program for a synagogue. One can associate about the temple: it is the whale that swallowed Jonah, it is the Tabernacle, it is the white cloud that guided the Israelites across the desert.