Sukkah City STL: Defining and Defying Boundaries
We are defined by boundaries.
Some boundaries are inherited from our families or our cultures, some are self-imposed or learned, but all of them are defining. Boundaries frame how each of us lead our lives. Boundaries can be restrictive, literally confining us to a finite time, space, or intellectual sightline, but boundaries can also, on occasion, point the way toward inventive discovery and help communicate who we are and how we relate to an expansive global society.
The Sukkah is a kind of physical manifestation of boundaries. It was the temporary dwelling for the biblical Israelites and today is a space for temporary dwelling in which to eat and converse. In addition to the biblical and cultural significance the Sukkah plays, this fragile dwelling is a tangle of complex juxtapositions. It is shelter, yet it is open to the sky; it embodies the promise of refuge and embraces the vulnerability of exposure to the elements. In this unique space, we are fully able to observe our lives and the boundaries that define them.
As Talmudic law allows, the bounding walls of the Sukkah may be somewhat fluid. The challenge for Sukkah City STL participants will not only be to build a Sukkah that meets ancient legal criteria, but also to explicitly examine and express a boundary issue that exists in our collective lives by using the medium of a structural ingenuity.
To this end, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, St. Louis Hillel at Washington University in St. Louis, and The Museum of ImaJewnation seek to start a conversation about the role boundaries play in defining and defying the contemporary human condition.
Among the questions participants may address:
• What does it mean to live surrounded by abstract boundaries that can be broken and
blurred, and are alternatingly rigid and pliable, new and old, often simultaneously?
• How are boundaries between parents and children, between teachers and students,
between men and women evolving?
• How do buildings communicate a juxtaposition of boundaries: prospect and refuge,
public and private, homeless and sheltered, temporary and permanent?
• How do we appreciate another culture without relinquishing our own? What does
religious identity look like in an intimate interfaith space?
• What does it mean to have a national border in a time of transnational corporations,
globalization, foreign workers, and illegal immigrants? What does it mean to live and
work in a country of which one is not a citizen?
Support for Sukkah City STL is provided by the Charles and Bunny Burson Art Fund at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
