DAMn° magazine # 26 / SUKKAH CITY

The Sheltering Sky

Sukkah Stories
The Jewish shelter known as a sukkah has been around long before micro-
architecture or pop-up spaces entered design vocabulary. Its very construction and
religious role is full of paradoxes, and in different ways the Sukkah City project in
New York and The Sukkah: A Fleeting House for a Jewish Holiday at the Jewish
Museum in Berlin both celebrate the multiple possibilities of its realisation.

text Anna Jenkinson

For Rabbi Michael Schwartz, there are few things to ri-
val enjoying a meal with friends and family in a sukkah,
a temporary shelter built during the Jewish harvest fes-
tival of Sukkot. With a canopy of greenery opening up
to the stars above, the simple structure provides an op-
portunity to reflect on our place in the world. ‘The su-
kkah helps us remember the fact that we are only here
for a short time. It also raises larger questions about
society,’ said Schwartz, who had just returned home to
Jerusalem after celebrating Yom Kippur at the Interna-
tional Jewish Centre in Brussels.
Home & Homelessness
The sukkah, often translated as hut or booth, is built
for one week each autumn as a place to share meals,
entertain, sleep and rejoice. It is a basic structure sub-
ject to complex design rules debated in the Talmud, or
ancient Jewish teachings. For example, the roof must
be made of schach, something that once grew in the
ground and yet is no longer attached to the earth, and
be thick enough to create shade on the ground and yet
thin enough to see the stars in the sky. The paradoxes
of the sukkah are not at a purely design level; they are
also sociological and theological. The festival celebrates
both harvest, a symbol of a settled community, and the Henry Grosman & Babak
Israelites’ wandering in the desert after the exodus from Bryan’s Fractured Bubble
(facing page, top), and Kyle May
Egypt. Building the temporary shelter highlights the & Scott Abrahams’ Log (facing
tension between home and homelessness, permanence page,bottom), both for Sukkah
and impermanence, being uprooted and belonging. City at Union Square,
New York, 2010
Photos © Nephi Niven
The design principles of this traditional, religious struc-
ture have been firing the imaginations of designers and
architects through the New York competition Sukkah
City. The competition, launched by the non-profit
group Reboot whose aim is to update Jewish traditions,
invited entrants to design a sukkah that adheres to the
ancient rules and simultaneously reimagines those lim-
its. More than 600 designs entered from as far afield as
Lebanon and Syria, China and Thailand, the UK and the
US. Each had its own interpretation of the rules, which
include that a sukkah needs to have a minimum of two
and a half walls, the walls must remain unshaken by a
steady wind and the sukkah must draw the eye up to its
roof and the sky beyond. ‘The architects had a very con-
fining set of structural challenges to wrap their minds
around. They loved the intellectual challenge of the
stricture of those rules,’ said Roger Bennett, co-founder
of Reboot and one of the competition’s organisers.

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DAMn° magazine # 26 / SUKKAH CITY

Sukkah City panorama at Union
Square, New York, 2010 (above)
Photos © Nephi Niven
Berlin, 2004 (right)
Photo © Mimi Levy Lipis
A jury of well-known architects, designers and critics
selected twelve winners, who travelled to New York to
build their sukkah and display them in Union Square
in late September. Henry Grosman and Babak Bryan’s
entry, ‘Fractured Bubble,’ was a sphere made of ply-
wood, marsh grass and twine. The spherical form,
fractured into three sections, reflected the sukkah as
an ephemeral and transient bubble that allows loved
ones to gather inside and together look out at a re-
newed world. Kyle May and Scott Abrahams’ ‘Log’ fo-
cused on the sukkah as a place of religious reflection,
using laminated glass walls supported from above by
a cedar log, a tree often mentioned in the Bible. Mean-
while, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello’s ‘Sukkah
of the Signs’ directly highlighted homelessness, using
cardboard homeless signs bought from the individu-
als who made them. Designer and architect Ron Arad,
one of the jurors, said he was looking for ‘brilliance,
ingenuity, surprise,’ of which he didn’t feel there was
quite enough. ‘Rules are there to be broken and ig-
nored. I would have loved to have seen more subver-
sion,’ said Arad.
Local Touch
Unlike those created for the competition, architect
Mimi Levy Lipis’s upcoming book and exhibition on
sukkah designs focuses on structures that were actu-
ally built for Jews to celebrate Sukkot. Lipis’s fascina-
tion with sukkah started about a decade ago when
she was as an architecture student at MIT focusing
on mobile structures and the geometry of structures.
Since then she has been taking photographs of the huts
on her travels to Antwerp, Jerusalem, New York and
many other cities around the world. For ‘The Sukkah:
A Fleeting House for a Jewish Holiday,’ which opens
at the Jewish Museum Berlin at the beginning of No-
vember, some 200 of her images will be beamed via
five projectors onto screens in the main photography
exhibition space. The installation, which Lipis found a
more appropriate response to the architectural theme
than simply an exhibition of framed photographs, will
also include quotes from the Talmud and the Bible in
order to connect the structures with the sources. Visi-
tors to the museum should not overlook Daniel Libes-
kind’s glass courtyard, which while not directly linked
to the exhibition is inspired by the sukkah.
into the buildings, in a stacked formation so that every Sukkahs in Jerusalem, 2005
sukkah has access to the sky. Seasonal produce can also (below) Photo © Mimi Levy Lipis
lend a local touch, with the roof covering being made
of perhaps corn stalks in the US or palm branches in Is-
rael. The harvest fruit decorating the inside also differs,
with for example apples and pears in northern Europe
or olives and pomegranates in warmer climates.
For Rabbi Michael Schwartz, who is also writing a book
about designing and building sukkah, personal touches
make all the difference. He and his wife use the poles
from their wedding canopy in their sukkah, reminding
themselves every year of their marriage celebrations. Re-
cently they bought a piece of cloth to put on one of the
sukkah’s walls and paint on the names of the guests who
celebrate there with them. ‘It will make a great family
heirloom,’ said Schwartz, for whom Sukkot is his fa-
vourite holiday, a time for both rejoicing and reflecting. #

During her research, Lipis noticed fascinating regional

differences. Walking around the Jewish quarter of Ant-
werp, Lipis was surprised not to find any sukkah. She
could see the schach lying around the street so knew
the festival was being celebrated but just didn’t know
where. ‘It turned out that they were built in inner
courtyards as it was considered very improper to have
them on public view,’ Lipis said. In the Marais district
in Paris, on the other hand, she found them on the
sidewalk. The colours also differed, with Americans of-
The winning designs of Sukkah City are on display at the Centre for
ten using bright blue and green plastic sheets bought Architecture, New York, until 30 October, www.aiany.org
from the local store, whereas the French opted for more The Sukkah: A Fleeting House for a Jewish Holiday, Jewish Museum
muted colours. For new construction projects in reli- Berlin, 4 November - 23 January 2011
gious districts of Israel, sukkah balconies are integrated www.sukkahcity.com / www.jmberlin.de

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