Date: 2024
Collaborator: Andy Kim
: Urban Farm, Berkely California
Typology: Community Project
Aerial Drawing of Las Vegas Suburb
The sukkah should be thought of as a public space, a space for education and celebration. Our project reimagines the sukkah as architecture accessible to not one group of people, religion or organization, but for everyone. Traditionally, the sukkah is a religious metaphor, a metonymic temporary structure for religious practices. For these reasons, the sukkah consists of three walls with an open roof allowing ccupants to gaze upon the sky, the stars, the endless, the Ein Sof. To remake its atavism with deference, while transforming it into a more inclusive public space, we propose a star gazing structure. It is oriented towards the northern Polaris, while exposing its largest surface covered with vegetation South. This greenery, its S’chach, becomes a living roof, “grown from the ground”. Stargazing has been a universal source of collective imagination. Civilizations have gazed upon the stars, developed instruments, made art, and drew inspiration from its endless sublime. Reimagining the sukkah as a stargazing structure is a poetic statement, a proposition, and a promise to make Sukkah accessible to all. The structure becomes a site of collective celebration, a space of Z’man Simchateinu, where the ‘public’ becomes specific and universal through the act of stargazing.
