Chicago Sukkah Design Festival
Festival Archive
2024
Twirl / Gira
Sukkah as Communal Table
Community Collaborator:
Street Vendors Association of Chicago
Design Contributor:
Cooperation Racine
This sukkah design embodies the vibrant spirit of the African-American and Latine cultures in North Lawndale and nearby La Villita, serving as a dynamic space for community meals and celebrations.
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With an emphasis on connection, the parasol-like structure will be adorned with colorful community murals and handcrafted textiles that reflect the rich histories of its participants. By incorporating a table structure as an integral design component, the sukkah builds relationships by inviting diverse publics to break bread together. The stepped platforms provide multiple opportunities for rest and participation, encouraging communal meals, storytelling, dialogue, and cultural exchange. The colorful canopy contributes to a playground-like feel, welcoming youth and community members of all ages to reconnect with their identity and celebrate cultural heritage. Now post-Festival, the sukkah provides a communal table and cultural hub for the Street Vendors Association of Chicago.
By The Book
Sukkah as Literacy Landmark
Community Collaborator:
Open Books and Chicago Children’s Museum
Design Contributor:
Palmyra Geraki and Alt Space
Let’s meet by the “book!” This sukkah is a haven, an inspiration, a playspace, and a landmark for the North Lawndale neighborhood and, especially, its children and their caregivers.
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By evoking weightlessness—book pages floating in midair—the sukkah design embodies the idea that reading transports the reader to another world, and emphasizes Open Books’ belief that reading can happen anywhere at any time. Now, post-Festival, the sukkah resides at16th Street near Avers Avenue, on a site that’s part of the Resilient Corridors Project. In addition to the sukkah, the site also hosts a Playful Learning Landscape installation focused on nature, water, word play, and conservation. Playful Learning Landscapes is a nationwide initiative that transforms everyday public spaces into joyful learning opportunities. Together, the site interventions aim to define and activate a welcoming, purposeful hub for local residents to foster care and connection to each other and to their public spaces.
Sharing Sukkah
Sukkah as Seed Exchange
Community Collaborator:
Chicago Public Library – Douglass Branch and SAIC at Homan Square
Design Contributors:
Andrea Jablonski, Martha Bayne, and Sheila Sachs
This sukkah offers interaction, modification, and user-directed adjustments.
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Inspired by “The Living Cube,” a multi-use, nomadic structure concept developed by Ken and Jo Isaacs in the 1950s, the Sharing Sukkah specifically facilitates the everyday activities valued by its participants, including communal gathering, lending and sharing, art making, and reflecting. After the Festival, the sukkah will be installed at “The Branch,” a community garden space stewarded by the Chicago Public Library Douglass Branch and activated by artists from SAIC at Homan Square. At the Branch, the sukkah provides various functional amenities including a seed exchange, a green wall of ivy, seating with storage, racks for drying plants or hanging tools, a community bulletin board, and a participatory chalkboard for sharing art, recipes, notes, and announcements.
Overstory
Sukkah as Hospital Stoop
Community Collaborator:
Sinai Chicago
Design Contributors:
Lindsey Krug, Andres Camacho, and Brad Silling
In the same way Sinai Hospital acts as the overstory—the protective layer—for the Lawndale community, this sukkah opens up to the neighborhood on all sides and welcomes us to gather under its elevated canopy.
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Now post-Festival, the sukkah provides a community stoop for Sinai Chicago’s bustling campus. Under the canopy, seating takes a cue from the porches of nearby residential buildings along West 15th Place, offering a new outdoor space where everyone can reflect and gather. Just as the hospital has evolved to meet North Lawndale’s needs, this pavilion aspires to be a backdrop for the lives of those who give and receive care, as well as for the many people who continue to shape the Sinai campus and the broader Lawndale community.
Bring Your Own Brick
Sukkah as Community Memorial
Community Collaborator:
Homan Grown
Design Contributors:
Office of Dillon Pranger, with Nailah Golden
Inspired by the history of the Chicago common brick and its prevalent use throughout the city, this sukkah is comprised entirely of reclaimed bricks found throughout the North Lawndale community.
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While waste is often perceived as problematic and undesirable, Bring Your Own Brick offers new possibilities for communities to engage with the physical, social, economic, and ecological qualities of construction waste. It also signals a paradigm shift to address the increasing shortages of vital building resources such as sand, tin, zinc, and copper. By carefully re-manufacturing and refinishing each reclaimed brick, the sukkah breathes new life into artifacts of the past and challenges visitors to reconsider our perception of waste. Now post-Festival, the sukkah provides a landscape beacon and garden material recycling station for Homan Grown, a wholesale perennial and tree nursery offering landscape design/build services in North Lawndale.
2023
One Lawndale Gathering Tree
Sukkah as Playscape
Community Collaborator:
One Lawndale Children’s Discovery Center
Design Contributor:
Studio Becker Xu
One Lawndale Gathering Tree is a space of togetherness that pays homage to the harvest celebration of Sukkot and brings the symbolic Tree of Life to the neighborhood.
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With a design inspired by a series of workshops with Lawndale youth, the Tree offers both a room for reflection and a place for projection. Like a tree changing through the seasons, the fabric foliage adapts, at times draping to shroud a singular space and other times gathering at the center to shade an open place. After the Festival, the Tree will be replanted at the forthcoming One Lawndale Children’s Discovery Center’s rooftop garden as a beacon of growth and abundance for the neighborhood, with the potential to support different types of programming. Each of the Tree’s four sides is adorned with artwork by Lawndale youth representing different scales of community: the self, the neighborhood, and the city. The Gathering Tree invites the public to sit and stay a while on its Star of David picnic quilt—a communal surface for the sharing of food, stories, and experiences during and after the festival.
Sukkah of Connectedness
Sukkah as Historical Marker
Community Collaborator:
Building Better Futures Center for the Arts
Design Contributor:
Antwane Lee
The Sukkah Of Connectedness manifests the role of Building Brighter Futures Center for the Arts (formerly known as the Better Boys Foundation) in the lives of the residents of North Lawndale.
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Joseph Kellman, a man of Jewish descent, founded BBF in 1961 as an organization to transform the lives of the inner-city youths in the neighborhood he grew up in. The sukkah exemplifies the interrelatedness and connectedness of the Jewish and African-American cultures and struggles. Both cultures migrated to Chicago seeking better lives and new opportunities. There is a strong sense of spirituality that helped to uplift and guide them during their struggles and a deep tradition of civic responsibility in their communities. The Sukkah of Connectedness is built to symbolize the cross-cultural connections of community and a oneness among all generations and peoples and represents a thirst to transcend, uplift, and grow through adversity. The co-design team engaged in a series of oral history workshops, led by the Chicago History Museum. Visitors can listen to recordings of these intergenerational stories. Now post-Festival, the sukkah is re-installed in the central courtyard of BBF’s headquarters where it serves as a historical maker of cogenerational creativity and an observation deck to view Untitled (Circulation), a wall installation and new work by Kerry James Marshall that lines the perimeter of the courtyard.
One to Many / Many to One
Sukkah as Living Museum
Community Collaborator:
North Lawndale Greening Committee + YMEN
Design Contributors:
Odile Compagnon Architect and Erik Newman
Slum Busters Garden’s One To Many / Many To One (O2M/M2O) is an homage to the collective work that Gerald Earles, Lorean Earles, and the North Lawndale residents put forth to make up for the lack of support and understanding from the authorities administering and planning the city.
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O2M/M2O is both a political act and an act of love. Each stick and knot that allows the structure to stand represents the North Lawndale people and the engagement they have taken toward one another and toward the land. The historic Slum Busters Garden is a living museum. It is the birthplace of the Chicago community garden movement. It is a teaching site for the next generation of activists, landscape designers, architects, urban gardeners, and peacemakers. The sukkah tells the stories of those people and this engagement. Now post-Festival, the sukkah is permanently installed at Slum Busters Garden and is visible from the CTA Pink Line trains passing above. Its brightly colored panels inspire others to join the movement, as the garden’s stewards have done for the past 40 years.
A Season is Set for Everything
Sukkah as Community Memorial
Community Collaborator:
Mishkan Chicago + Lawndale Christian Legal Center
Design Contributors:
Architecture For Public Benefit + Trent Fredrickson
A Season Is Set For Everything reflects the interfaith collaboration and intertwined histories of the Jewish and Christian communities that participated in its design.
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During the Festival, the sukkah serves as a space for shared worship and learning. After the Festival, the sukkah will be relocated to Lawndale Christian Legal Center where it will serve as a memorial honoring the lives of young community members that have been lost to violence. The project is anchored in Ecclesiastes 3, a shared scripture that is read during the holiday of Sukkot and during times of transition and remembrance. The walls of the structure act as storage vessels and provide moments of connection, storytelling, and remembrance. Visitors are invited to discover the individual perspectives of each community member that contributes an artifact to the walls, to add an artifact reflecting their own experience, and to celebrate life’s varied and ever-changing seasons.
I AM BLOOMING
Sukkah as Community Memorial
Community Collaborator:
I Am Able
Design Contributors:
Akima Brackeen + Vincent Calabro (Office of Things)
I AM BLOOMING weaves together the rich traditions of African, African-American, and Jewish cultures, celebrating their shared values of communal gathering and the cyclical nature of life.
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In African and African-American cultures, these gatherings have been a central aspect of community life, where participants arrange themselves in circular formations to foster a sense of unity and togetherness through rituals of ring shouts, drumming circles, rap cyphers, and healing circles. In parallel, the Jewish holiday of Sukkot embraces impermanence both in the realm of time and the built environment by commemorating the seasonal harvest, and encouraging a deep connection with nature and community, cycles of growth, and the transitory nature of materiality and the human experience. By acknowledging the cyclical rhythms of life, I AM BLOOMING creates a unique space for grounding, reflection, and mindfulness. Visitors are invited to rotate the built-in benches/planters, to reconfigure the space for different types of gatherings and to make the space their own. After the Festival, the sukkah will serve as an outdoor meditation pavilion at I AM ABLE, a faith-based trauma-informed care agency providing services from birth to the end-of-life.
It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood Toolshed
Sukkah as Tool Library Demo Station
Community Collaborator:
Chicago Tool Library
Design Contributor:
Could Be Design
It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood Toolshed is a sukkah for displaying, retrieving, and animating a collection of loanable equipment from the Chicago Tool Library, a non-profit lending library of things based in Chicago’s West Side that provides equitable access to tools, equipment, and information, allowing all Chicagoans to learn, share, and create.
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The installation consists of a crisscrossing pattern of marine plywood ribs, shaped into a cocoon-like, welcoming enclosure. Colorful, reconfigurable shelves snap into the installation to create shapely nooks and crannies for storing tools and artifacts. Now post-Festival, the sukkah is re-installed at the Chicago Tool Library’s headquarters, where it facilitates a permanent tool demonstration station and scenic backdrop for instructional YouTube videos that feature items from the Chicago Tool Library’s inventory.
2022
The Giving Sukkah
Sukkah as Farmstand
Community Collaborator:
Young Men’s Educational Network
Design Contributor:
Human Scale (Walmer Saavedra, Kasia Pilat)
The Giving Sukkah is a farmstand where the community can sell and exchange produce grown throughout North Lawndale’s vibrant network of community gardens.
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The sukkah also responds to and connects with an existing installation in the neighborhood called Grids + Griots (designed by Sekou Cooke Studio) that dissects a shipping container into a dynamic, multifunctional plaza for Young Men’s Educational Network. The Giving Sukkah riffs on traditional sukkah building customs as a three-and-a-half-walled structure with an organic roof composed of upside-down planter beds. The sukkah also incorporates handprints of community members, imprinting the collective identities of its inhabitants on its door and pop-up awning.
The Storytelling Sukkah
Sukkah as Micro-Museum
Community Collaborator:
Stone Temple Baptist Church
Design Contributor:
New Office
The Storytelling Sukkah showcases North Lawndale’s history & heritage through interactive walls and visual references that point to the neighborhood’s storied past & future.
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The arched architectural forms celebrate the house of worship (located across Douglas Boulevard) that originally housed a Jewish synagogue (First Roumanian Congregation) and that now serves as Stone Temple Baptist Church. The sukkah’s slanted entrances reference the angled gesture of a mezuzah (a traditional Jewish doorpost ornament), and the color gradient from blue to purple signifies the neighborhood’s broader demographic and cultural changes over the past century. After the Festival, the interactive walls will be re-installed inside Stone Temple to provide a preview of the church’s future history museum space; the sukkah will remain on site for neighbors to share old stories and envision new futures.
The Imagination Station
Sukkah as Literacy Hub
Community Collaborator:
Men Making a Difference and Open Books
Design Contributor:
Chicago Design Office and Made in Englewood
The Imagination Station is a pavilion for multiple forms of literacy: academic, artistic, cultural, and architectural.
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Supporting the organizations of Men Making a Difference and Open Books’ North Lawndale Reads campaign, the structure offers space for children and adults to engage with small-scale multimedia libraries, including fiction and nonfiction, comics, study materials, hair accessories, art materials, and more. The steel frame allows for different materials to infill the facade, creating layers of transparency and visibility. Children can participate in the making process by applying adhesive images of their favorite book and TV characters to acrylic panels that hang along the back of the structure. After the Festival, the sukkah also offers a long-term space for gathering and learning.
Explore
The festival will take place at James Stone Freedom Square, located at the intersection of Douglas Boulevard and Millard Avenue (3615 W Douglas Blvd, Chicago, IL 60623) with sukkahs changing location afterwards to more permanent locations around the neighborhood.