Break the Sun: Ofra Kessler

The encounter between architecture and people, and the relationships that take shape between them in public space, preoccupies and fascinates me. For me, the home does not end at the apartment door: it continues into the stairwell, onto the building façade and into the street—the place where the private and the public meet and change alongside one another. I love wandering slowly through the city and lingering over what lies before our eyes every day yet remains outside our gaze. In the spirit of Georges Perec’s “infra-ordinary” (in French: L’Infra-ordinaire), I look דווקא in the everyday and seemingly marginal details for the ways in which they tell the story of life unfolding in space.

This project began about six years ago, when I moved from Haifa to Tel Aviv and discovered buildings in my neighborhood whose façades incorporated grilles—Brise-soleil (“sun breakers” in French)—unique to each building. I discovered a wealth of forms, rhythms and patterns, alongside changes that had accumulated over the years. My curiosity led me to expand my wandering and photograph these grilles in additional neighborhoods in Tel Aviv and in other cities throughout the country.

The “sun breaker” was invented in the first half of the 20th century by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. It was designed as a modern response to the damage caused by sunlight in buildings with glass walls, and was successfully tested in buildings in Brazil. In Israel, it was adopted during the 1950s and 1960s as a local climatic solution for residential buildings and public structures: a grille intended to provide shade, ventilation and light regulation. Before long, these grilles became a prominent element of the local architectural language. Each architect designed a unique pattern of their own, and in this way the brise-soleil became part of the building’s identity and a significant decorative element in the urban landscape.

Over the years, residents adapted the “sun breaker” to their needs: openings were closed, windows were cut through, and glass, aluminum, air-conditioning pipes and electrical cables were added. Each change was specific and personal, but the accumulation of changes created a new façade—one that had not been planned in advance, but was gradually shaped by life itself.

The project views the Israeli “sun breaker” as a kind of architectural palimpsest—a surface on which layers of planning, use, constraint and time are inscribed one over another. The original design has not disappeared; it continues to exist alongside the later interventions. The façade becomes a living document, bearing the traces of the architect, the residents and time.

Many of the photographed buildings are currently facing demolition as part of urban-renewal processes. With them, a significant chapter in the local architectural language will also disappear: a language born from the encounter between climate, material and light, and that developed into a local form of ornamentation.

The photographs do not seek to decide between the architect’s intention and the residents’ actions. They invite us to regard the façade as a space of ongoing negotiation between planning and life, between permanence and change, and to ask what is lost when not only the buildings themselves disappear, but also the layers of time, use and identity inscribed upon them over the course of decades.

Ofra Kessler

Language editing: Dr. Amit Kama