Misha Semënov-Leiva and Ethan Blake, founders of a sukkah-building competition in Berkeley, don’t remember much about celebrating Sukkot as children. It wasn’t until they were adults that the holiday became important to them. Now they are using their combined scholarship in architecture, urbanism and design to express what makes it so meaningful.
For Semënov-Leiva, the connection to Sukkot happened at his wedding, which took place right before the harvest holiday. He and his wife, also an architect, constructed their own chuppah, shaped like a Star of David and built with PVC pipes. They later converted it into a sukkah as the sun set, an experience he described as “magical.”
For Blake, who has a degree in urban studies from Brown University and is now a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, it was a Sukkot celebration in Jerusalem that became a “game-changer moment.” Seeing how the holiday encourages people to live, eat and celebrate together inspired him to explore ways to expand public space.
“The thing I love about Sukkot is the openness of hey, we’re just gonna hang out here every night,” Blake told J. “There’s no invitation, no RSVP, just come by, we’ll eat, hang indefinitely.”
Their sukkah-building competition, called 16Cubits and inspired by similar projects such as Reboot’s Sukkah City in New York, invited three teams to Urban Adamah in Berkeley to build out their winning sukkah designs, some using experimental building materials. The event will culminate in a day of educational workshops held inside the built sukkahs on Sunday, Oct. 20.
The farm has hosted Sukkot celebrations in the past, but this year’s festival will be their largest to date, featuring music jams, a community dinner and a benefit auction.
Blake is an alum of Urban Adamah’s three-month fall fellowship program, which combines education around urban agriculture, community service, and Jewish living. By co-founding 16Cubits with Semënov-Leiva, he joins the ranks of other Adamah alumni who have gone on to harness their fellowship experiences in innovative projects.
Though the competition encouraged interfaith groups to participate, they were surprised when the first informational Zoom call attracted only non-Jews. All were eager to learn about Sukkot, Blake and Semënov-Leiva said, interested in exploring themes of nomadic existence and temporary dwelling while showcasing their construction design skills.
“The eagerness and the curiosity about learning about the holiday I think is really fantastic,” said Semënov-Leiva, a San Francisco native who holds master’s degrees in architecture and environmental management from Yale. “As we all know, it’s been a really difficult year for the Jewish community engaging with others, and I feel like events like this are really key to bring people in, explain what our traditions are, and why they have so much meaning.”
In their call for submissions, the 16Cubits founders specified the halachic requirements for the sukkah, translated into modern measuring units: at least three walls, standing at least 40 inches high, an area of 36 square feet, with a roof that provides shade only and doesn’t block the view of the stars, etc. As for the building materials, the central aim of the competition was for teams to use “bio-based” material as much as possible within a $3,000 budget.
What counts as “bio-based”? Anything made from living or once-living organisms, such as cork, seaweed, bamboo, wool, salvaged wood, shells or mycelium block, just to name a few.
“The experimental aspect of just having a bunch of supplies and having to figure it out on the spot in the spirit of the holiday is something we also want to enable, so we’ll see how we achieve that tension this year, and adjust for next year,” Semënov-Leiva said days before the construction began. “We’re thinking of a lot of this as a learning opportunity.”
The participants on the three teams include an international mix of Jews and non-Jews, established architects, current students and recent graduates of architecture programs at Yale, Washington University in St. Louis and the Pratt Institute in New York. Throughout this week, they have been staying at Urban Adamah to lead design workshops and build their sukkahs with the help of volunteers.
Architects Adin Rimland and Andy Kim, who met as undergraduates at Pratt, submitted a design inspired by the “outdoorsy” nature of the holiday. They call their design the “stargazer.”
“We were interested in stargazing as a universal act,” Rimland, a Jewish architect at the Berlin firm Barkow Leibinger, told J. “Part of the programming of Sukkot is to sleep under the stars, and that kind of resonated with us. And so our sukkah is facing toward Polaris, and on a clear night, you should be able to see it [through the structure].”
Kim works as an instructor at Syracuse University’s School of Architecture. Though he is not Jewish, he sees this competition as an opportunity to both learn about and share the values the holiday teaches.
“We wanted to make a structure that is accessible to everybody, not only spatially but conceptually,” Kim said. “So that [this design] is open to interpretation, and it’s connected to very elemental things, such as the sun and the stars.”
On Oct. 20, 16Cubits will auction off the three sukkahs, hoping to attract JCCs and other organizations interested in showcasing an innovative and unconventional sukkah at their facilities.
Proceeds from the silent auction will be donated to Dandelion Kitchen, a local nonprofit and offshoot of the Berkeley Food Network that delivers home-cooked vegetarian meals using recovered produce to people in need throughout the East Bay. The nonprofit is planning on using the proceeds to expand its distribution, according to co-founder and chair Rob Biniaz.
The Sunday Sukkot festival will have free programming from 2 to 6:30 p.m., including chocolate tasting, an ornament-making workshop and a lecture on bio-based building technologies, among other events. Urban Adamah is located at 1151 Sixth St. in Berkeley.