Chicago Sukkah Design Festival

The Chicago Sukkah Design Festival pairs community organizations in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood with diverse architectural designers to design and construct sukkahs, small outdoor pavilions built for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Working collaboratively, teams explore design literacy, social justice, and neighborhood futuring. The festival celebrates cultural heritage and amplifies solidarity among the Jewish community who lived in North Lawndale historically, the predominantly Black community that resides there today, and the broader Chicago community. It engages the neighborhood’s multicultural history, builds interfaith partnerships, and elevates the role of design in building an anti-racist city. During the festival, the landscape of unique sukkah structures is activated with cross-cultural public programming, co-organized with the Lawndale Pop-Up Spot, bringing together intersectional pairings of neighborhood groups. After the festival, each sukkah is relocated and permanently reinstalled at the facilities of the community organizations that co-designed them, as vibrant new program spaces.