Reinventing Ritual

We’re midway through Sukkot, the harvest holiday that also marks the wanderings of the Jews through the desert after the Exodus. A main ritual of this holiday is the construction of a temporary outdoor shelter open to the sky. Jews eat in this hut for seven days reminding them of the fragility of life and the beauty of nature. Recently, at least in the U.S., Sukkot has been reinvented as the great DIY holiday, when families and communities dust off their power drills and ladders and use whatever materials are handy to work together to build their sukkah.

Sukkot is on track to become what Passover has been the last few decades: the Jewish holiday that embodies the values of the community today. As the floating world of the Internet continues to expand into every facet of our lives, the life of brick-and-mortar, real world places will have the duration more of a blog post than a cathedral. In the architecture world in general there is great interest in temporary structures, from tents to pop-up stores to art exhibits in shipping containers.

Judaism, as an inherently nomadic and diasporic religion the last two thousand years, is well equipped for the 21st century preference for the ephemeral. The sukkah is this structure par excellence, a temporary shelter for the bringing together of community and ritual, in a joyous and beautiful way. Two works in Reinventing Ritual explore the evanescence of the sukkah.

Francisca Benitez’s video Sukkah analyzes the fascinating lives of sukkahs in the congested urban neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, built on fire escapes, roofs, balconies, and alleyways. The video contains four sections: construction, proliferation, use, and deconstruction. A staccato editing quality, and electronic soundtrack by Memoy Demay, defamiliarizes an already unusual practice in America, reinforcing the artist’s interest in how the sukkah is physically temporary and ancient at the same time. A good comparison is the famous Shinto shrine at Ise, Japan, where the temple is rebuilt entirely every 20 years.

The other work is the full-scale Gardening Sukkah by Allan Wexler. This piece won the Leir Prize and has been discussed in a previous post. If Benitez takes a purely architectural exterior view of the sukkah, Wexler is more interested in its usage as a temporary site for eating. He focuses on the interior of the work, meticulously mounting all the utensils and tools needed for ritual meals and gardening. By tying the meal as the essence of the sukkah to the annual cycle of nature—planting, reaping, lying fallow—Wexler helps us recall that architecture is at service of human activity.

The web (and the Museum’s online collection) is full of interesting news articles about creative sukkahs this year, from a drive-thru in Pinecrest, Florida to a student design/build project at Wesleyan University. The range of expression and interest is only growing each year. The Museum is interested in continuing to explore the sukkah in the future.