NEST

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON | COMPETITION FINALIST

Why do we come together? Because we have been apart. Why do we crave the new? Because we care for the old. Why do we seek stability? Because we know the benefit of mobility. 

We live our lives along these boundaries. Our sukkah is built right upon this dividing line, not as a barrier, but as a threshold. This physical space allows us to shift between the antitheses that define our lives. Here we circle up together; but leaning back I break away, and am alone amongst the stars. Here is a new structure, that testifies to the power of memory and ritual. 

It is no mistake that bamboo is our primary building material—it too lives and dies in between. Dried, it is rigid, and used as poles to form the walls. Green, it is pliable, wound into rings to bind the structure and stretched over the top to form a leafy canopy. For this campus, a new material, but built in an ancient way, bound with rope, come together briefly before being scattered and reformed. In this way, the sukkah resembles those who will inhabit it—a brief communion in a long and complex life cycle. Only active participation leads to engagement, a willingness to bring the foreign into the familiar.

Neither is the curtain an accident. It is a permeable membrane. When seated, on the inside of the curtain, we are in community. Leaning back, I shift, moving through the curtain and absenting myself from the group. Now, I am alone. 

This curtain is the line between absence and presence, togetherness and isolation, foreignness and familiarity, that we walk our entire lives. Our Sukkah embraces both sides of the dichotomy, allowing us to engage fully with others without relinquishing our own unique identities, and in so doing becomes truly a universal home.