For the Jewish festival of Sukkot, Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn commissioned BanG to build a communal sukkah. Senior Rabbi, Andy Bachman wanted to recreate the spectacle of the previous year’s Sukkah City competition, where BanG’s Fractured Bubble was visited by over 150,000 people. The challenge posed by the rabbi was to work within a smaller budget, on a tighter time-frame to produce a structure that was four times larger and could be used by the congregation for actual religious observance of the holiday.The title of the new sukkah, “In the Field” is a conscious double entendre. It evokes the feeling produced by the structure as a pastoral retreat from the everyday into a transitional and temporary space. In addition, it reflects the intentional ad-hoc nature of the construction, which was assembled by a team of congregants, who made small-scale design decisions during the construction, in the field. This sequence of seemingly incidental decisions produced the “natural” quality of the space.BanG designed ITF as a project in which the whole congregation could participate. The larger formal structure of the sukkah is established by a structural cage of steel rebar cut to size, bent into shape, and positioned in precise locations on the site using a temporary brace. The lumber was then cut into standardized pre-defined lengths and sorted into piles. The shape of the cage and the quantities of lumber were determined by a parametric computer model which was used to direct the form at thelargest scale.Construction on site proceeded with teams of congregants selecting each piece, marking the location where holes would be drilled, drilling the holes, and finally threading the lumber in to the structure. The only instruction provided was that nothing should be made to align. The process of selecting, marking, and threading created the jagged quality of the surface. By eliminating the need to measure, the construction could be finished in the two days allotted.According to Jewish tradition, one must not only erect the sukkah, but also beautify or decorate it. It was very important to the congregation that BanG design in a mechanism through which children could participate in the process. In keeping with the dialogue between the natural and the artificial, we laser cut 1500 leaves out of rigid cardboard. The leaves came in three varieties: maple, oak, and aspen. They were twice the size of ordinary leaves and perfectly symmetrical. We gave the leaves tothe children of the congregation along with three gallons of paint in red, orange, and yellow. They were instructed to paint the leaves any way they wished as long as they fully covered all of the cardboard.The sukkah was erected on the sidewalk adjacent to the synagogue and was finished just in time for the start of the holiday. It remained through the duration of Sukkot (8 days) including the congregation’s annual street fair, where it was visited, enjoyed, and used by many.