Framing Devices

Fifteen falls ago, I spent a night sleeping on the ground of Union Square Park, inside a hut cloaked in hundreds of hand-scrawled cardboard pleas. “Help if you can. God Bless.” “Disabled Vet. Need Help. Please.” “Broke & Hungry. Anything Helps.” “Gas? Anything?”

It was the opening night of Sukkah City, the design contest I organized with Roger Bennett, who had cofounded the Jewish arts collective Reboot. We’d invited the world’s leading architects to reimagine one of the world’s oldest structures. Twelve winning firms each received $10,000 to construct their “radically temporary” kosher pavilions in the middle of one of New York City’s most trafficked parks. The Parks Department required at least one member of our team to be on site around the clock. I drew the short straw for the first night.

I chose to sleep inside the sukkah that seemed most private, designed by California architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello. They had spent most of their prize money traveling up and down the Pacific Coast buying hundreds of cardboard signs from beggars, which they used to completely wrap a wooden frame until the structure read like a chorus of desperation.

Just after daybreak, I awoke to a clamor of male voices speaking in Arabic. With some trepidation, I peered out to find a dozen taxi drivers lined up in neat rows, bowing low between the ritual huts. Our little experiment in reimagining a fragile Jewish shelter had, overnight, been transformed into a temporary mosque. For me, that unexpected morning minyan was a reminder of the improbable grace of New York—and of an ecumenical America that today feels increasingly distant.

The sukkah is one of the world’s oldest architectural archetypes. It has been passed down not as a set of blueprints, or as a specific model to be replicated, but rather as a set of precise halakhic parameters. And while our talmudic building code is incredibly specific in certain respects, it is whimsically open-ended in others. The design brief for the competition came, very simply, from the Shulchan Aruch: at least two and a half walls (but what is a wall exactly?), a roof made of uprooted organic materials (which cannot be food or anything conventionally useful), walls that sway by no more than a handbreadth, and on and on. Is it kosher to adaptively reuse a recently deceased elephant as a wall? It certainly is. Our brief read:

Ostensibly the sukkah’s religious function is to commemorate the temporary structures that the Israelites dwelled in during their exodus from Egypt, but it is also about universal ideas of transience and permanence as expressed in architecture. The sukkah is a means of ceremonially practicing homelessness, while at the same time remaining deeply rooted. It calls on us to acknowledge the changing of the seasons, to reconnect with an agricultural past, and to take a moment to dwell on—and dwell in—impermanence.

We mailed posters to every architecture school in the country and lined up press in magazines and blogs popular with designers. A jury of notable architects and critics was assembled to judge the contest, including the industrial designer Ron Arad, designer of the National September 11 Memorial Michael Arad (no relation), New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, graphic designer Steven Heller, artist Maira Kalman, and Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne. A different mayoral administration, at a different time, in what feels increasingly like a different city, not only approved our harebrained scheme to erect a dozen religious pergolas in one of the city’s most public squares but greased the civic wheels to make it happen.

The design entries were all due at midnight on a Sunday in August. On Friday afternoon, I called Roger in a state of panic. “We’ve only got about fifty real submissions,” I told him. “Two are amazing, three are mildly interesting, and the rest are garbage.” Sukkah City was looking like an early Fyre Festival. But architects, it turns out, procrastinate like writers. Over the next day and a half, the designs poured in—over five hundred submissions from forty-three countries. Out of that flood, our jury selected twelve designs to be built in Union Square and featured in a six-page spread in New York magazine, which invited its readers to vote for the “Official Sukkah of New York City.”

One team balanced a massive cedar log on four pristine plates of architectural glass, distilling the essence of the sukkah into a single, precarious magic trick. At the insistence of our rabbinic consultant, Dani Passow, the architects drilled tiny holes through the timber so that rain could fall through, making it halakhically valid as schach. Another firm, Matter Practice, created a two-thousand-pound cocoon of wire from a single spool of steel wound around a bamboo scaffolding. Just before the exhibition, they removed the bamboo to reveal a rigid bird’s nest draped with dried flowers. The firm tinder, tinker built their sukkah from thousands of wooden shims—the disposable scraps of the building trade—stacked into a shelter of improbable dignity. And the sukkah that captured the public’s imagination, winning the popular vote to remain standing through the holiday, was Fractured Bubble, an intricate explosion of invasive weeds harvested from a park in Queens and woven into a shimmering wooden frame by Henry Grosman and Babak Bryan.

For two days, Union Square was transformed into something between a festival and a pilgrimage site. The full spectrum of New York Jewry wandered through, shoulder to shoulder with the city’s usual parade of the curious and the passing by. In that brief window, more than 150,000 visitors encountered Sukkot, making Sukkah City not just one of the larger design competitions of recent memory but one of the largest public celebrations of Jewish life in New York’s history.

Every so often, we toy with the idea of reviving Sukkah City, but I doubt we could pull off such a spectacle today. The motifs that once felt timeless—homelessness, encampment, wandering the desert, eating beneath the stars—now carry a darker weight in the shadow of October 7. And the public square, even and especially in New York, feels less and less like a place where Jewish life can be celebrated in safety, let alone with exuberance.

When we leave the sukkah each fall for the last time, we recite one of our oddest blessings: a prayer that next year we might merit to dwell in a sukkah fashioned from the skin of the sea monster Leviathan. But I would happily settle for another fragile hut of river weeds rising in the heart of New York.