Pal-met-to; -noun, plural -tos, -toes;
any of various palms having fan-shaped leaves.

In celebration of the Jewish Festival of Sukkot, the sukkah or "booth" as translated from Hebrew, serves as a memorial to the temporary structures built by the Israelites during their 40-year wandering after their exodus from Egypt. As others have noted, the designs of these temporary structures are not intended to be prescriptive in appearance, but rather follow traditional parameters that allow for variation and interpretation on an individual basis.

In this spirit, our sukkah proposal both recognizes and deviates from time-honored traditions. For example, we have followed consensus that require sukkahs to have a minimum of three walls and a roof that shades during the day while still allowing stars to be seen at night. However, we have chosen to break with traditional constraints such as the literal use of schach and tree branches as a roofing material.

Instead, we were interested in exploiting atmospheric affects based on an abstracted representation of schach or specifically in this case the palm leaf. To this end, the Palmetto Sukkah is designed to be constructed from unitized, repeatable patterned blocks that are based on the geometric logic of the palm branch. These units are then stacked, rotated and aggregated in such a way that the differentiation between roof and walls are minimized and a new kind of sukkah atmosphere is created.