Sukkahville is an international design competition that challenges entrants to re-imagine the Sukkah. A Sukkah is a temporary structure built during the Jewish festival of Sukkot to commemorate the 40 years that Jews spent wandering the desert. It is described as a symbolic wilderness shelter, symbolizing the frailty and transience of life. Proposing an innovative Sukkah design that balances the dichotomies of new/old, open/closed, temporary/permanent is the challenge inherent in this competition.
Shield of David
As contemporary designers our perspective for this project completely repurposes the traditional sukkah, we began exploring primary concepts like: typology, structure, daylighting, & cost. Our conclusions made us think about patterns and layering, we consider that the current architecture debate deals more with relationships, boundaries and energies, in our floor plan the central core element (a tree) represents the Jewish heart surrounded by a series of secondary elements representing other aspects of Jewish history, integrity and tradition.
And finally, we saw an opportunity to approach with a methodology of ornamentation, our proposal “Shield of David” presents a modular & prefabricated design that is based on the hexagram abstraction, the result creates a permeable wood typology, a cluster of integrated stacked units that are easy to assemble