Sukkot Festival

A sukkah is a temporary architectural structure with Biblical origins; it is "an ephemeral, elemental shelter, erected for one week each fall," Joshua Foer writes, "in which it is customary to share meals, entertain, sleep, and rejoice. Ostensibly the sukkah's religious function is to commemorate the temporary structures that the Israelites dwelled in during their exodus from Egypt, but it is also about universal ideas of transience and permanence as expressed in architecture." The modern-day sukkah is thus both nostalgia and reenactment, substitution and performance

The basic constraints seem simple: the structure must be temporary, have at least two and a half walls, be big enough to contain a table, and have a roof made of shade-providing organic materials through which one can see the stars. Yet a deep dialogue of historical texts intricately refines and interprets these constraints - arguing, for example, for a 27 x 27 x 38-inch minimum volume; for a maximum height of 30 feet; for walls that cannot sway more than one handbreadth; for a mineral and botanical menagerie of construction materials; and even, in one famous instance, whether it is kosher to adaptively reuse a recently deceased elephant as a wall. (It is.) The paradoxical effect of these constraints is to produce a building that is at once new and old, timely and timeless, mobile and stable, open and enclosed, homey and uncanny, comfortable and critical.

See what others have done before us: Sukkah City

The Alta Vista Gardens Sukkot Festival is an international design competition to re-imagine this ancient phenomenon, develop new methods of material practice and parametric design, and propose radical possibilities for traditional design constraints in a contemporary urban Garden. Six finalists shall be selected by a panel of celebrated architects, designers, and critics to be constructed and displayed in a visionary temporary village located in and around the Ceremonial Garden of Alta Vista Gardens

One structure will be chosen by visitors to stand and delight throughout the year as the ultimate example of the spirit of the Sukkah. The process and results of the first three years of the competition, along with construction documentation and critical essays, will be published in the forthcoming book "The Sukkahs of Alta Vista Gardens: Radically Temporary Architecture for the Next Three Thousand Years."

Dates:

• Sukkot Festival 2013 September 19-25

• Sukkot Festival 2014 October 9-15

• Sukkot Festival 2015 September 28- October 4

The Competition

Rules for building a Sukkah