above: one of the ten winning submissions, 60 degree Sukkah by Filip Tejchman of Brooklyn, NY, and Cambridge, MA
Some of my readers may recall a post I wrote last year on Sukkah City, a design competition held in New York that proposed redesigning a Sukkah, a traditional shelter created for the Jewish Festival Of Sukkot.
Building and expanding upon New York’s Sukkah City 2010, Sukkah City STL proposed a re-imagination of the Sukkah, an ancient and temporary structure used by both nomads and harvesters. The jury selected work that defined and defied boundaries using ancient law and the contemporary experience of shelter. The design winners are below.
Emery McClure Architecture, Lafayette, LA - Tené
Act3 (Ben Kaplan), Trivers Architecture and STL Beacon, St. Louis - Storycubes
Sean Corriel, New York - Thru-motion
Lea Oxenhandler and Evan Maxwell Litvin, Philadelphia
Alexander Morley and Jennifer Wong, St. Louis - Exodus
Casey Hughes Architects, Los Angeles - Sukkah Collective
Christine Yogiaman, Forrest Fulton and Ken Tracy, St. Louis - Gleaned
John Kleinschmidt and Andy Sternad, New Orleans - L’Chime Sukkah
Bronwyn Charlton and Linda Levin, St. Louis. - Heliotrope
WHAT: Sukkah City STL: Defining & Defying Boundaries WHEN: Oct. 18-22 WHERE: Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis, near the Ann W. Olin Women’s Building COST: Free and open to the public
The Jewish Feast of the Tabernacle, Sukkot, begins at sundown on Oct. 12, 2011, and ends at nightfall on Oct. 19.
Support for Sukkah City STL is provided by the Charles and Bunny Burson Art Fund at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
above: a modern sukkah, Fractured Bubble, by Henry Grosman and Babak Bryan was "Fan favorite"
Thanks to Ren and her wonderful blog, Lady of The Arts, I have learned about 'Sukkah City', an international design competition which took place last week in New York to re-imagine Sukkahs, the temporary shelters or dwellings built during the week-long traditional Jewish Festival Of Sukkot to commemorate the homelessness that occurred during their 40 years of wandering in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt.
It's not easy to describe a Sukkah, so I'll let this video by Liz Nord do it for you:
Traditional sukkahs:
624 people from 43 countries entered the competition. The 12 temporary structures that were chosen as the winning designs by a very impressive jury (listed later in this post) were constructed in Union Square Park’s South Plaza and were displayed publicly on September 19th and 20th (one of them, P.YGROS.C, collapsed immediately after construction). Here are the 12 winning concepts.
Gathering by Dale Suttle, So Sugita, Ginna Nguyen: LOG by Kyle May and Scott Abrahams: Blo Puff by Bittertang: P.YGROS.C / passive hygroscopic curls by THEVERYMANY / Marc Fornes with Jared Laucks: In Tension by SO-IL: Sukkah of the Signs by Ronald Rael, Virginia San Fratello: Star Cocoon by Volkan Alkanoglu: Single Thread by Matter Practice: Shim Sukkah by tinder, tinker: Repetition meets Difference | Stability meets Volatileness by Matthias Karc: Time/Timeless by Peter Sagar: Fractured Bubble by Henry Grosman and Babak Bryan: See all of the impressive entrants from 43 countries here.
Reality Disappoints? While the concept of Sukkah City is fresh and exciting, some of the more common criticisms of the event were that the discrepancy between the impressive renderings and actual built structures were fairly great-- the completed buildings were disappointing when compared with the imagined concepts.
The Gathering Sukkah as imagined and as realized:
"Log" was one of the few designs that remained faithful to the original rendering:
The blog Human's Scribbles has great good side-by-side comparisons of the renderings with the completed structures.
The two day display culminated with Mayor Bloomberg announcing “Fractured Bubble,” a design created by Henry Grosman and Babak Bryan of Long Island City, Queens, as the “People’s Choice” winner:
The following photos from the event are courtesy of Benjamin Norman for the New York Times, who published this article on the event: above: a panoramic view of the event above: peeking inside the Shim Sukkah above: the Blo Puff sukkah, a far cry from the original rendering
The process and results of the competition, along with construction documentation and critical essays, will be published in the forthcoming book "Sukkah City: Radically Temporary Architecture for the Next Three Thousand Years."
The jury consisted of these impressive designers, illustrators, architects and writers: * Michael Arad * Ron Arad * Rick Bell * Allan Chochinov * Matias Corea * Paul Goldberger * Steven Heller * Natalie Jeremijenko * Maira Kalman * Geoff Manaugh * Thom Mayne * Thomas de Monchaux * Ada Tolla * Adam Yarinsky
Next year, Sukkah City will expand from New York City to cities all around the world. If your community would like to be part of Sukkah City 2011, please contact them atsukkahcity@gmail.com.
To learn who was behind this, the sponsors and more, visit Sukkah City.
The Treehouse home, on Banyon Drive in Los Angeles, is perched upon steel pylons that are naturally integrated into the surrounding trees. With a butterfly roof, the 16 square meter home is perched upon an eastern facing ridge, giving it a wonderful view of downtown Los Angeles.
The interior floors and walls are made of walnut wood and the exterior is high grade cedar. Designed for a nature loving artist, it serves as both as a studio and as guest accommodations. The tree house is completely self-sufficient with a water closet, fireplace, refrigerator, daybed, and television. Outside, a quick walk down the stairs leads to a protected and private outdoor shower.
The Villa Vals Underground home (which I'd actually written a huge post on but then it appeared on so many sites and blogs, I refrained from publishing it)
