Chicago Sukkah Design Festival — Open Architecture Chicago

Program and Partnerships Co-host

Open Architecture Collaborative Chicago serves as the Program and Partnerships Co-host for the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival.

Working collaboratively, teams explore design literacy, social justice, and neighborhood futuring.

The Chicago Sukkah Design 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. During the Festival days, from October 6–26, 2024, 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 re-installed at the facilities of the community organizations that co-designed them, as vibrant new program spaces, including a communal table, seed library, garden material recycling station, literacy landmark, and hospital campus stoop.

CSDF’s 2024 edition is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.

The Chicago Sukkah Design Festival is co-hosted by:

Cultural Programming

The Afrofuturist dance workshop, a participatory, communal experience led by Ytasha Womack, a critically acclaimed author, filmmaker, dancer, and champion of the imagination along with sounds by DJ Shannon Harris, Audio Pharmacologist, known for his creative individuality, pushing boundaries in the DJ, music production, & composition scenes.

The Interfaith Dinner - It is customary during Sukkot to invite guests into one’s sukkah to eat and enjoy the space together. The Chicago Sukkah Design Festival is partnering with Stone Temple Baptist Church, Metro Chicago Hillel, and the Jewish Community Relations Council to host an Interfaith Community Dinner, inviting members of all faiths and cultural backgrounds to come together to break bread, share space, and create shared memories in the six sukkahs on the festival grounds

Design for Liberation- Join the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (JCUA) and Freedom House in a youth-led facilitated discussion about the shared struggles of combatting anti-Blackness and antisemitism as well as the collective cultivation of identity, dignity, place, and belonging. This program is centered on teens and college-aged young adults.

The JCUA brings together the Jewish community to pursue justice in Chicago and Illinois. Freedom House is a North Lawndale-based organization led by Haman Cross III that is dedicated to transforming communities through the arts and creative placemaking.

Chicago Sacred- What is the heritage of belief? Join the Chicago History Museum’s Rebekah Coffman, Curator of Religion and Community History, Joanna Bak, Program Associate, and Greg Storms, Senior Public and Community Engagement Manager, for a discussion on the diverse ways sacredness has been preserved, shared, and activated in Chicago from the past to the present. We will explore the question: what does it mean to safeguard heritages of belief for the future? This program will include a time for discussion as well as a time for activation through a heritage reflection activity.

This program is co-presented with the Chicago History Museum.

For more Chicago Sukkah Design Festival program examples see the CSDF Program page.