Fractured Bubble

Manhattan, New York, NY, United States

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Fractured Bubble

Manhattan, New York, NY, United States

Type

Cultural ›
Government + Health ›

YEAR

2010

Fractured Bubble was selected from a pool of over 650 competition entries as one of twelve structures to be included in the Sukkah City 2010 exhibition in New York City. A sukkah is a ritual hut built for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. According to Jewish tradition, it is erected each year as a temporary dwelling to commemorate the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. The competition organizers created Sukkah City as venue for architects to reconsider the design of the sukkah in the context of contemporaryarchitectural practice. The project was largely pre-assembled in a studio space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The superstructure is comprised of 252 individually CNC milled pieces of plywood, and the interior skin is woven using 8000 linear feet of hemp cord. Missing only its outer skin, Fractured Bubble left Brooklyn in the evening on September 18, 2010. It travelled by flatbed truck to Union Square in Manhattan where it was installed in its final location. At midnight thirty hands went to work covering the structure with marsh grass. Fractured Bubble opened to the public on the morning of September 19 at 7:00am. That day over 150,000 people visited Sukkah City.The design constraints imposed on a sukkah by Jewish law are strict. In order to be considered “kosher,” the structure must satisfy all of them. For example, the sukkah must have at least three walls. The roof of the sukkah must be made of organic material, and it must be possible to see the starts through the roof. If it rains, water must penetrate the sukkah, but the structure must provide more shade than sun. The organizers of the design competition insisted that sukkah must be kosher underboth Jewish Law and the code of the New York City Department of Buildings.Our design for Fractured Bubble began with a series of design charrettes at various sites in Brooklyn. The purpose of the charrettes was to establish for ourselves what it meant to create a temporary dwelling in a public park, a ritual structure in a diverse world city. We decided that the sukkah should be understood as a bubble: ephemeral and transient. It separates inside from outside with a thin, permeable membrane. Outside is the world of everyday life. Inside the bubble, one can gather togetherwith friends and loved-ones, look out to the world again and see it fresh, transformed. In accordance with tradition, our sukkah is made of simple materials; plywood, marsh grass and twine. Its form is a sphere fractured into three sections. Each section is rotated around a common datum point. The oration of the structural grid and the puncturing of the skin are controlled parametrically. Because of the spherical geometry, each of the sections is both wall and roof simultaneously. To make the sukkah kosher, provide three sections (like walls), and we cover each section entirely with marsh grass harvested from a park in New York (like roofs). The visitor enters through one of the fractures (whose dimension is also controlled by Jewish Law).The Hebrew term for the roofing material is s’chach. Our s’chach is made of phragmites, an invasive species of grass that has taken over America’s wetlands. It grows fast and tall, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation lets us harvest ours for free. The phragmites attach loosely to the sukkah through stochastically scattered holes in the rib structure. They follow the curvature of the sections to create a crosshatched affect providing shade from the sun. The density is calibrated such that one can still see the stars at night. The circles and the twine skin the interior surface of the sukkah. The twine weaves a radial layer of crosshatch, and the circles articulate the holes in the bubble. We adjust the location of the holes in the surface to frame views outward from inside the sukkah. Different holes for different sites tailor the experience of being on the inside looking back out.

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Fractured Bubble

Manhattan, New York, NY, United States

Fractured Bubble

Manhattan, New York, NY, United States

Product Spec Sheet

Collaborating Firms

Team