Today I’m in Seattle visiting family with the kids (it’s their spring break!) and plan on going outside to sketch all the loveliness of the Pacific Northwest spring. I hope you enjoy this brief summary of my design process with one of my most recent architecture projects.
Hello friends,
It’s final project time for my architecture class. I have a few more weeks to go, but I thought I’d share the first phase of what I did for the project, which is to create a sukkah. We watched this documentary in class as an introduction, which was called “Sukkah City” and took place at Union Square in New York City.
Sukkot is a Jewish holiday centered around harvest. Our challenge was to create a prototype of sukkah, share it with our class, and the top 5 projects by popular vote will get a team behind them to create a final version.
Phase 1: The flower and shape.
When my family moved to San Francisco in 2019, we lived in a very modern but small-ish apartment in the Dogpatch neighborhood. Some of the greenery nearby included beautiful abutilon shrubs, with flowers that hang like delightful lanterns. I strongly associate those flowers with that time in my life of great transition and change. I wanted to capture the curves of the petals in my design.
Phase 2: The wall
I created a wavy form with the wooden dowels inspired by the flower petal. But when I started thinking about different ways to hold the dowels together, I started to get a sense of weaving to get the transient feeling I wanted from this temporary structure. I initially thought of baskets and waving grass as what I was going for with this part of the design.
Phase 3: The roof, platform and path
As you can see, after I created the woven wall I repeated a woven motif for the roof. This was inspired more by thoughts of birds weaving a nest. The path mimics the top of a shaft of wheat; I imagine in a further iteration it would actually get woven with multiple complete shafts of wheat.
Well that’s it for this week, I’d love to know what you think!