Joseph Altshuler

Current Projects

Chicago Sukkah Design Festival

Joseph is the founder and Artistic Director of the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival, an annual public art and architecture exhibition of outdoor pavilions that celebrates cultural heritage and build solidarity. The Festival amplifies cross-cultural celebration and social justice by initiating meaningful design collaborations among diverse designers and social service organizations in the Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood. After each annual Festival, the pavilions are relocated and permanently re-installed at the facilities of the community organizations that co-designed them, as vibrant new program spaces. The first annual Festival launched in October 2022 featuring 3 collaborative sukkah design/build teams. The second annual Festival will launch in October 2023, showcasing 6 sukkah design/build teams.

Supergraphic Landscapes

Joseph is co-PI for the design research project Supergraphic Landscapes, which was awarded by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’s Call to Action to Address Racism & Social Injustice Research Program 2022–23. Supergraphic Landscapes is an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of architecture, graphic design, and landscape architecture that explores the role of urban-scaled graphics and creative placemaking that amplify identity, access, and belonging in public spaces. Challenging the industry’s term “environmental graphics,” Supergraphic Landscapes pushes the power of graphics beyond information (wayfinding) and into realms of space, place, and community-building (worldmaking). In the 2022, the city of Gary, Indiana commissioned Could Be Design to design and realize a set of new pedestrian crosswalks informed by this design research. The project, entitled Gary-goyles: Crosswalk Camaraderie addresses existing deficiencies and historic racism embedded in the city’s public transportation network, integrating strategically located pedestrian access with joyful placemaking tactics that enhance the urban streetscape.

Architecture Animacy & Companionship

This body of design research explores the formal, organizational, and social ways that architecture behaves like an animate “creature,” offering an expanded capacity to build identity, relationships, empathy, and companionship. In response to this research, the Siebel Center for Design commissioned Joseph’s team at Architectural Companionship Laboratory to design and build a series of installations that activate their new building’s interior public spaces with intimate pockets of personal programming. Each installation provides specific programmatic platforms and landmarks including a welcome desk, a gateway arch, a mobile amphitheater backdrop for lectures/performances, and a mobile exhibition display kiosk that has wandered away from the pack. The creatures of the Animate Arcade embody animated characteristics like personality, posture, facial expressions, charisma, and attitude that collectively initiate companionship with you, their human visitors, in order to prompt interactive encounters. This way of seeing the world provides an opportunity to redefine our own human personhood, and to acknowledge all that we have in common with other creaturely companions of the built environment.