BYOB (Bring Your Own Brick)

2024 Chicago Sukkah Design Festival

Team: Dillon Pranger, Michael Graham, Emily Duong, Maddigan Cox, Isac Colta, JP McCullough Photography: Brian Griffin

Inspired by the simultaneous beauty and horror of masonry decay found in many urban contexts, BYOB focuses on reclaimed brick found throughout the city of Chicago. While each element was previously viewed as unwanted, the work tests one’s perception of the everyday discarded by carefully remanufacturing and refinishing each brick to breathe new life into artifacts of the past.

While masonry is often associated with static construction, BYOB challenges this notion by designing a temporary structure using a modular assembly logic, like traditional brick construction, but through both wet and dry connection details.

Initially designed to celebrate the Jewish holiday, Sukkot, the project takes on the programmatic characteristics of a sukkah, including a minimum of two walls, a space large enough for two people to gather within, having its roof composed of natural materials (ie. Schach), and, most importantly, temporal in nature. Given these constraints, the project’s elements are designed with the intention of allowing for five scales of disassembly – wall, column, module, panel, and individual brick – to maximize the possibility of future reuse after the festival has ended.