URBURB, the Israeli Pavilion for the 14th International Architecture Exhibition — la Biennale di Venezia, responds to the theme of Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014 by presenting an artistic meditation on the development of Israeli space under the sway of modernist conceptions of progress.

 

The resultant Urburb – swaths of urban sprawl which are neither urban nor suburban – characterizes the great majority of residential areas in contemporary Israel. In the endlessly expanding Urburb environment, new residential communities continue to pop up, separated by large expanses of open land - locked in and dislocated.

 

The pavilion is transformed into a construction zone, where four printers inscribe images on desert sand, and then erase them. Every few minutes a new image replaces the previous one. Together they tell the stories of one hundred years of modernist construction in Israel.

 

As quickly as the various schemes are etched into the sand, so are they wiped away, emphasizing how these generic pattern-oriented plans are “printed” from above according to changing ideologies and numerous ‘master plans.’