The exhibition “Housing Unit” addresses new construction which is largely neglected in architectural research—multi-story, multi-tenant apartment buildings. Yair Barak and Tal Garbash accepted the invitation of the Architect’s House Gallery, and embarked on a photographic quest in the country’s center, from Ashdod to Netanya, after new building projects. The realization of the dream of a “home” is presented in the exhibition as a consumerist process in which the buyers choose a housing unit from a limited category of products, a unit which is part of a builder’s production mold designed for buyers of their type, based on socioeconomic indices.

In the late 1970s governmental involvement in Israel’s housing reduced, and residential construction shifted to the private market.(1) The competitive real-estate market evolved, and with it—an essentially consumerist popular-visual culture, whose agents included construction companies, architects, importers and chain stores specializing in construction materials, advertising agencies and magazines. From this broad-ranged visual world, the exhibition focuses on a three-dimensional vehicle for marketing architecture, unique to the building branch—the model apartment. The model apartment manifests the way in which entrepreneurial construction, which produces multiple housing units, is primarily attentive to the way in which it is perceived by consumers.

The model apartment is an artificial construct, a simulation of real life. It was spawned by the need of the building companies to attract the anonymous consumer, and provide him with an illustration of the final product at a stage when the project exists only on paper, in the form of sketches, models, and simulations which are usually unclear to him. Ostensibly, the model apartment is intended to illustrate the use of space for the prospective tenant, but in effect, it not only serves the sale process, but also purports to illustrate to the potential buyer how he ought to shape both his apartment and his life, as explicitly declared in an ad for one of the building projects featured in the exhibition: “So far everyone has been showing you a model apartment; we will show you a model life.”

Indeed, the inhabitants of the apartments featured in “Housing Unit” engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the construction companies, and were influenced by the architectural practice reflected in the model apartments, yet were entirely unfamiliar with the architect who designed their apartment, unsurprisingly, since the architects who design such projects are attentive to the purchase experience of the prospective buyer, but are unable to meet with all the potential buyers of a hundred-unit neighborhood. The absence of architects from the exhibition indicates the weakening of the architect’s status in entrepreneurial construction.

The protagonists of “Housing Unit” are, thus, the interior designers and the dwellers of the typical apartment. Yair Barak’s photographs expose the work of interior designers who regard themselves as guides enabling the public at large, with average means, to design their apartment in keeping with the latest trends introduced in Europe’s prestigious design exhibitions. (2) Barak documented model apartments in several cities in Israel’s center—one apartment in each city. The apartments were sampled from popular advertisements in the newspaper real-estate supplements during the shooting time, regardless of their quality of design. The series presents seven different apartments, although it sometimes appears as though only a single apartment is depicted in the photographs, for the design style and specific pieces of furniture supplied by several leading stores recur in most of them. Thus, by virtue of the series, the engaging design of a single model apartment is rendered onerous due to the repetition of a rigid aesthetic code leaning towards the modern, natural look.

“Housing Unit” points at the unification of the housing market, which reduces the differences between the poles of the Israeli middle class, between center and periphery, to variations on the number of rooms, the cost of finish materials, and the furnishings. The model apartment is exposed as a sophisticated vehicle for regulating taste according to the latest housing fashions.

Barak devotes himself to the luring aesthetics of the model apartment: total design, soft colors, blinding light filtered by means of rich curtains. Concurrently, and in contrast to commercial photography, however, he does not eliminate the small finish flaws from the frame: exposed electrical outlets, masking tape left on the back of the bed, and signs explaining to potential buyers that purchase of the apartment does not include the electrical appliances present in it.

Tal Garbash photographs apartments in relatively new buildings in residential neighborhoods in Yehud, Or Yehuda, and Ashdod. She documents identically-designed apartments, but her work explores what happens to the apartments once they are handed over to their tenants: to what extent is a distinctive Israeli housing culture created in them, and in what way is one’s personality manifested in a situation of replicated housing units. She seeks the lodger’s fingerprints and anecdotes which serve as evidence that someone indeed lives in the apartment. The positioning of the camera and the editing of the frame result in ego-free photography, attentive to the dwellers.

The juxtaposition of the series of model apartment photographs and those of lived-in apartments produces a subversive effect in its attempt to present a widespread, mundane housing culture to the audience. Moreover, the approach arising from the exhibition is also one of anti-design, since the viewer, tired of the binding fashion embodied by model apartments, is refreshed precisely by the personal distinction in the “non-designed,” inhabited flats.

1. For an elaborated discussion, see: Naomi Carmon and Daniel Czamanski, “Housing in Israel: From Planned Economy to Semi-Free-Market Management,” Housing Science 16 (1): 47-60, 1992.
2. Following a conversation with architect Liora Niv Fromchenko.

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Local 1: Housing Unit

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