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While ephemerality in contemporary architecture usually refers to temporary structures exhibiting new construction technologies, innovative conceptions, materials and structures, the notion is as old as architecture itself and has served, throughout history, as a vessel of becoming. If Plato considered our world as a receptacle for the transforming and evolving copies of the unchangeable models, of Ideas, ephemeral architecture, considered as that which allows being and becoming, has no fixed qualities of its own, but forms itself to that which it contains, and as such, has the potential of becoming a symbol. While being less interested in its consumption-related transience, on its "haute couture" play of forms and volumes at the Universal Exhibitions, this paper is interested in exploring the various aspects of ephemeral architecture with a precise focus on the paradoxical state of permanence it had the ability to embody throughout history, starting with the Tabernacles of Moses, and reaching the 19th and 20th centuries with their technological prowess, their manifesto buildings as symbols of a new era being born, of a new worldview that shaped the epoch we presently live in, up to the point of shaping our perceptions of what architecture is and should be. The study followed an interpretative-historical research, and used a process of combination based on Western and Eastern philosophy, history of religions, and literature on the history and theory of architecture. The paper explores the links between secular and devotional ephemeral architecture, taking into consideration the fact that different functions can operate in similar shapes, the essence of a building, be it temporary or not, residing in the meaning encrypted in its language and its spatial composition. The title of the paper encodes, in itself, the substance: "Cathedrals of ephemerality" refers precisely to those ephemeral building that became cultural icons, while "Impermanence as symbol" refers to their unchanging - albeit intangible - essence kept alive and present in the collective mind, thus creating an intelligible thread of meaning throughout history. Additionally, the subject of the research allowed, as a side note, an inquiry into the very nature of architectural space, Daoist philosophy representing an excellent tool when analyzing the relationships between exterior and interior, between built space and empty space, between container and contained, and offered this particular research the connecting line between past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]