Growing up, Joseph Altshuler would build temporary structures called sukkah in his family's backyard in northwest suburban Barrington and then they would invite neighbors over to share meals to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkoth.Altshuler has always been interested in this custom during Sukkoth, a Jewish harvest festival that commemorates sukkah, which are temporary shelters used by the Jews during "the 40-year period during which children of Israel wandered in the desert after leaving slavery in Egypt," according to the American Jewish Committee. Also known as the "time of happiness," Sukkoth begins at sunset Oct. 16 and ends at nightfall Oct. 23. Altschuler is now an architect, and his work focuses on how public spaces can foster solidarity, community building and belonging and his experiences growing up coalesced and served as a catalyst to him co-founding the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival. "Borrowing this Jewish custom was a way to think about and experiment with more radical formats of public space, and also more radical formats of where architecture and public art meet," said Altshuler, 37, who is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-founder of Could Be Design, a Chicago-based design practice. Joseph Altshuler, co-founder and artistic director of the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival, speaks to passers-by at the James Stone Freedom Square in North Lawndale. Five teams designed sukkahs, temporary huts commemorating the temporary shelters used by Jews as they wandered in the wilderness.Pat Nabong/Sun-Times This year's festival starts on Sunday and runs until Oct. 26 at the James Stone Freedom Square, 3615 W. Douglas Blvd. in North Lawndale. The festival, now in its third year, pairs community organizations in North Lawndale with architectural designers to design and construct sukkahs. It is traditional for observers to eat and sometimes sleep in sukkahs for seven days to commemorate Sukkoth. Construction of traditional sukkahs follows customary rules that come from the Torah and the Talmud, Altshuler said."One of the defining features of sukkah is that the roof has to cast more shade than light, but it also has to be permeable, such that you can see the sky through it, and even more importantly, that you can see the stars and the moon through it at night," he said. Altshuler said the designers are encouraged "to reinterpret the biblical rules through a contemporary lens and to be extremely experimental about trying to test some architectural design idea through the process." The “Overstory sukkah” was designed by Lindsey Krug, Andres Camacho and Brad Silling in collaboration with Sinai Chicago. Pat Nabong/Sun-Times Five sukkahs will be on display throughout the festival. One of them is "By the Book," co-designed by Palmyra Geraki and Jordan Campbell in partnership with Open Books and Chicago Children's Museum.Geraki is a founding principal at architecture practice Palmyra PLLC, and Campbell is co-founder and executive director of Alt Space Chicago, an organization that focuses on healing Black trauma through art. Community and collaboration are some of the reasons they chose to participate in the exhibit, they said on Saturday as they built the festival's final exhibit.It's "seeing problems, but coming up with solutions together and allowing ourselves to feel what we feel because it's part of the human experience," Campbell, 33, said. "That only happens with community and collaboration, which has been powerful in the process for us."Campbell added: "We're kind of creating a bridge through art and design." Their exhibit uses vibrant colors and floating book pages to emphasize the understanding that "reading doesn’t have to come from a book all the time," Geraki, 39, said. Lindsey Krug (right), a designer with the “Overstory sukkah,” helps flip a sculpture that is part of the “By the Book” sukkah by Palmyra Geraki and Alt Space.Pat Nabong/Sun-Times After the festival, each sukkah is relocated and permanently added to the facilities of the community organizations that co-designed them as new program spaces, including a communal table, seed library, garden material recycling station, literacy landmark and hospital campus stoop. The festival takes place in a lot that was once grassy and vacant across the street from Stone Temple Baptist Church, which was built in the mid-1920s as a synagogue for Jewish immigrants who came to Chicago to escape antisemitism in their native Romania. The synagogue became a church in the 1950s, as Jewish immigrants moved further north and African Americans, fleeing Jim Crow segregation in the South, moved in. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached there during his time in Chicago.The church is one of the festival's "key partners," Altshuler said. "They have taken great efforts to preserve the Jewish identity of that original building, as well as they've taken great efforts of finding out more about the families and members of that congregation to build more future-looking relationships between those communities. And so that church architecturally serves as sort of a backdrop of the festival."The neighborhood's past and present are "the heart of our efforts," Altshuler said. "Our fundamental mission is to build solidarity and relationships between many of Chicago's diverse communities." Mary Thomas (right) and her daughter Sharhonda Clark, who stopped by the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival as they participated in a breast cancer awareness walk, sit on a bench at the James Stone Freedom Square in North Lawndale. Pat Nabong/Sun-Times Sharhonda Clark is a resident of North Lawndale and has driven by James Stone Freedom Square in the neighborhood where the festival takes place, but she came to see the exhibit up close for the first time Saturday. She said the festival is an opportunity for the neighborhood's youth to be creative and thrive."I think that it means that we have a future, and that the future for our next generation growing up will foster their creativity, and being creative is an outlet for lots of people," Clark said. Participants of a breast cancer awareness walk view custom-built sukkahs Sunday in North Lawndale. Pat Nabong/Sun-Times