these interlopers should look familiar
The design competition Sukkah City encouraged its entrants—all 600 of them, from 43 countries—to marry religious tradition with architectural radicalism in the timely form of short-term shelter. A jury chose twelve finalists, whose structures will stand in Union Square on September 19 and 20; by voting here, you, our readers, will choose the winner. It’ll be on view until October 2.
In a way, these interlopers should look familiar. In recent years, a scattered army of architects has tried to invent cheap, simple, and portable ways to house millions in a hurry. They have designed budget houses for hurricane victims, cabins made of paper tubes, refugee tents, tsunami shelters, mobile homes, habitable shipping containers, polyester yurts, and so on. Temporary architecture also has its high-art counterparts, such as the Starn twins’ Big Bambú, a gloriously rickety castle of cane stalks lashed together atop the Metropolitan Museum, and SO-IL’s pole-and-mesh installation that’s on view through September 30 in the courtyard of P.S. 1.
Unlike more practical or whimsical instances of pop-up construction, the sukkah functions as concrete, if multivalent, symbol. It can be an expression of empathy with the homeless, which is why Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello fashioned a hut from hundreds of cardboard signs bought from the indigent. It can also become a semi-sanctum, an outpost of antiquity in the hectic present. Peter Sagar captures that mixture of separateness and participation in his entry, Time/Timeless, in which a hemp-fiber scrim turns the world outside into a shadow play. Henry Grosman and Babak Bryan’s Fractured Bubble, a wooden globe shaggily clad in native city grasses, interprets the sukkah as
however an urban civilization’s nod toward nature and the autumn harvest. These assorted meanings do not compete or exclude one another; ambiguity is part of the tradition.
