Exhibition Opening: The Architect’s Dream | Maja Gratzfeld & Roy Zvulun

What do we see in architecture, and how do the images we have inherited shape our gaze? In the exhibition “The Architect’s Dream,” architect Roy Zvulun and artist Maja Gratzfeld, life partners, bring together two distinct perspectives on modernism's legacy and the gap between the imagined building and its lived reality.

Their meeting point is Hadar HaCarmel in Haifa, where modernist architecture finds local expression in stone, plaster, color, and hybrid features shaped by complex layers of building history, from the region and beyond. Through his ongoing research project, “Portrait of Hadar,” Zvulun seeks to reconstruct the buildings’ original forms, before they were transformed by time and their inhabitants. Alongside his sculptures are textile works by Gratzfeld, who transfers views of the city onto fabrics and curtains. Between the aspiration to reconstruct a building in its entirety and an image that never ceases to change, the exhibition explores how architecture exists in material form, memory, and imagination. The encounter with Hadar offers a fresh perspective on the familiar image of the “White City,” inviting us to consider the space between the planned and the everyday, the ideal and the real, and the building and its image.

“The Architect’s Dream” is exhibited in the Liebling Haus Project Room. The space encourages creatives of all disciplines to take an active role in a critical investigation of the question, "What is the White City?" as part of alternative, collaborative and ongoing research that approaches the White City as a platform for contemporary discourse on conservation, urbanism, identity and culture in the city. The Project Room is the open end of the permanent exhibition in the Liebling Haus, telling the tale of the White City as a point of departure for a story in the making. It is an opportunity to invite the creative community to address current challenges the city is facing on a local and global scale and present different perspectives and alternative narratives.

Curator: Sabrina Cegla

Maja Gratzfeld (*1982 in Saarlouis, Germany) is an artist working across photography, textiles, material processes, and installation. She studied at the Dresden University of Fine Arts (HfBK Dresden), where she completed her Diploma and subsequently a Meisterschüler postgraduate program under Prof. Ralf Kerbach. Further studies took her to the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes and the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Her work has been exhibited in Germany and internationally, including at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn and the Kunstsammlung Chemnitz. She was a fellow at Stiftung Künstler*dorf Schöppingen, Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include Verwobene Echos at the Saxon Museum of Industry – Tuchfabrik Gebr. Pfau, Crimmitschau, and So Small So Humble I Float in the Sea at the Maritime Museum Haifa. Gratzfeld’s artistic practice examines how images acquire, lose, and transform meaning through shifts in material, context, and ways of seeing. Alongside her artistic practice, she works as a lecturer, with an emphasis on critical approaches to images and representation.

Roy Zvulun (born in 1985 in Bat Yam, Israel) is an architect and partner at Granovsky & Zvulun Architects, whose practice spans urban planning, conservation, and urban renewal. He studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, where he completed his B.Arch and received an Excellence Scholarship from the Department of History and Theory. He previously worked alongside architect Galia Weiser and Prof. Baruch Baruch. His work encompasses projects and research at a range of scales, from master plans and policy documents to buildings, public spaces, and conservation studies. His projects include Portrait of Hadar, an ongoing research project and architectural archive dedicated to Haifa’s Hadar HaCarmel neighbourhood. In 2024, his firm won first prize in the “Architecture of Tomorrow” category of the Architecture Award, presented by the Israel Association of Architects and Urban Planners. Zvulun’s architectural practice examines the relationship between buildings, the histories of their surroundings, and the lives unfolding within them, as well as how archival knowledge and architectural documentation can form a basis for contemporary design. Alongside his professional practice, he conducts independent research focused on critical readings of buildings, typologies, and architectural representations.