A Sukkah Reimagined, Harvard Style

When most people think of Jewish holidays, images of temporary shelters probably don't pop into their minds.  Though not as popularly known as Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, one of three harvest festivals in the Jewish religion (along with Shavuot and Passover), is significant to many.  As part of the Sukkot festivities, Jews traditionally create a temporary shelter in which they sing, eat and celebrate for seven days.

According to rabbinic tradition, these temporary shelters, or "sukkot," represent the huts that the Israelites lived in during their 40 years of wandering in the desert after escaping from slavery in Egypt.

Last year, Ben Lehrer, an architecture student at Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD), celebrated the holiday in a sukkah that didn't live up to his aesthetic expectations.  So this year, along with 12 of his GSD classmates, he created his own.

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