CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The Chicago Sukkah Design Festival is an architectural design festival in the Chicago neighborhood of North Lawndale that brings together architects and community organizations to create gathering spaces to connect residents. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign architecture professors participating in this year’s festival built a bicycle kiosk and a pop-up theater, which will be on site through Oct. 25.
The festival, which runs for three weeks in October, was co-founded in 2022 by Illinois architecture professor Joseph Altshuler. It was inspired by the Jewish harvest holiday of Sukkot, when Jewish families build temporary huts called sukkahs in their backyards where they eat meals and socialize with neighbors during the celebration.
Altshuler said the festival derives from an interest in examining how temporary architecture and public art can generate long-term strategies for community development.
“Sukkahs transform backyards into public spaces for one week. We’re demonstrating how that can happen at a neighborhood scale and as a platform for broader community building,” he said.
The festival pairs designers with a community organization to reimagine the tradition of creating sukkahs. It asks that the structures also serve a need of the organizations, so they will outlast the festival itself, Altshuler said.
“Each pavilion has a completely different purpose, a completely different form and a completely different role in amplifying a community organization’s mission,” he said.
Architecture professors Hugh Swiatek and Gideon Schwartzman created “Pedal and Pause,” a kiosk with bicycle parking and seating, with Working Bikes, an organization that collects and repairs bicycles and distributes them to people in need of transportation in Chicago and worldwide. The circular ribbed structure resembles the chain ring of a bicycle, with bench seating inside and a perimeter that acts as a stand for bike parking.
“Sukkahs are meant to be structures for inviting neighbors over for discussions and for meals. It was very important for us to have a structure that facilitates that kind of discussion,” Schwartzman said.
The festival teams fabricate their own designs. The bicycle kiosk is made of CNC-routed plywood with a modular design featuring 12 component parts that can be disassembled and rearranged.
Swiatek said they hired students to assist with fabrication, an experience that helps them understand how design decisions align with the fabrication process.
Swiatek and Schwartzman said they designed in anticipation of the sukkah’s second life, trying to make the design as flexible as possible for future use. The bottom portion of the kiosk will serve as a new service counter for Working Bikes, which is currently renovating its space. The upper portion could serve as shelving and a place to highlight Working Bikes’ mission.
Illinois architecture professor Alina Nazmeeva and design consultant and architect John Wagner worked with Theatre Y, an experimental theater group, to design two mobile multifunctional structures. Partly inspired by North Lawndale’s stoops, “Pavilion Y” is two bright green pavilions with tiered seating that are on casters so they can be moved throughout the neighborhood. Theatre Y was a roving theater for many years before it recently got a permanent space in the North Lawndale neighborhood.
“It resonates with the fluidity and experimental nature of theater,” Nazmeeva said of the mobile nature of the pavilions. She said the pavilions can be used as a stage, as urban furniture and as a symbol of the theater to gain visibility in the neighborhood. When the two pavilions are positioned face to face, they form the silhouette of the letter Y.
“We think about it as very huge furniture. It was a really fascinating challenge to design something large and mobile at the same time,” she said.
Wagner said the pavilions remove boundaries between actors and audience members and allow the audience to become more immersed in plays.
The bright neon green pavilions were fabricated from a broad range of materials, including a painted steel frame clad with translucent mesh that veils the structure. The pavilions are adorned with colorful wood and hand-woven cord benches for seating.
The architecture professors will discuss their work at an Architect’s Roundtable on Oct. 19 at 2 p.m. at the festival site, James Stone Freedom Square, 3615 W. Douglas Blvd., Chicago.
Altshuler hopes the festival will help people engage with the rich cultural history of the North Lawndale neighborhood. Jewish immigrants settled there in the early 20th century before the neighborhood transitioned to predominately Black residents in the middle of the century. The neighborhood played an important role in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. advocating for fair housing there.
Altshuler said architecture and design can serve as intercultural bridge building, encourage people from different backgrounds to connect with one another and promote collaborative community development.
The festival is represented at this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial, North America’s largest survey of contemporary architecture.
The sukkah festival was a satellite venue and featured contributor to the Chicago Architecture Biennial two years ago. This year, it is represented in Common Chicago, an exhibition of projects by Chicago-based designers who envision how common spaces can build stronger and more equitable communities. The biennial commissioned large-scale drawings, collages and models that represent that work, which are on view through Jan. 31.
Altshuler’s drawing, “Festival Cartography,” is part map and part illustration, with a perspectival view of the festival grounds woven into a map of North Lawndale, showing where the festival pavilions are relocated.
“So often the final product an architect makes is a technical construction drawing that instructs a contractor how to construct a building. With this exhibition, architects can think of other creative ways beyond technical construction documents to show how architecture has an impact in the world,” Altshuler said.
Altshuler will share more about the drawing and the broader urban design ambitions of the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival at the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s Everything Chicago symposium on Oct. 17 at 3:30 p.m. at the Driehaus Museum, 50 E. Erie St., Chicago, as part of public panel discussion entitled “Common Chicago: Collective Space.”
Editor’s notes: To contact Joseph Altshuler, email jshuler@illinois.edu. To contact Hugh Swiatek, email swiatek3@illinois.edu. To contact Gideon Schwartzman, email gbschwa2@illinois.edu. To contact Alina Nazmeeva, email nazmeeva@illinois.edu. More information about the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival is available online.
