Byzantine Fresco Chapel, Religious art museum in Houston, United States

The Byzantine Fresco Chapel is a museum in Houston displaying restored medieval religious artworks in a modern structure of glass, stone, and wood. The building sits on the Menil Collection campus and uses a large skylight to flood the interior with natural light.

The chapel was built to house two restored frescoes from the 13th century that were rescued from art thieves in Cyprus in 1983. These medieval works remained on display in Houston until their return to their home country in 2012.

The chapel's name comes from the Lysi dome and apse frescoes it held from 1997 to 2012, when they were returned to the Church of Cyprus and sent to the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia. Since 2015 the building has hosted temporary site-specific projects, among them The Infinity Machine by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, a rotating array of antique mirrors with sound drawn from NASA recordings of solar winds.

The chapel stands on the Menil Collection campus near the University of St. Thomas. Its only opening is a 1,012-square-foot clear, double-glazed skylight, so daylight enters from above rather than through windows. The 4,000-square-foot building is oriented to face the cardinal directions, which helps with orientation once inside.

The chapel's rough limestone exterior wall deliberately echoes the masonry of the original St. Evphemianos church in Lysi, Cyprus. Inside, architect François de Menil set a freestanding sandblasted laminated-glass structure within a steel "reliquary box", so the glass walls are an abstracted evocation rather than a replica of the Cypriot chapel.