“My dream house is not a house” deals with two of the first publicly subsidised, social housing projects “Gerlitzgründe” and “Eschensiedlung” by architect Eilfried Huth from the 1970s in Styria.
The working method he developed envisaged a form of collaboration in which architects and future residents could meet as equals.
The result of these processes were individual houses designed by the residents themselves in the context of the housing estate, where no two houses are the same.In an endeavour to provide access to housing for everyone, Huth planned the first construction phase (30 units) of the Gerlitzgründe in Graz for low-income young families under the age of 30.
The projects were unique because at the time there was no possibility of a participatory approach outside the privately financed market.
Julia Gaisbacher grew up in the brutalist terraced housing estate in Graz in the 1980s, where she was influenced by the ideas of communal living of the late 1960s in general and by the architects of Werkgruppe Graz in particular. This background contributed to her interest in housing and questions of private and public space. Gaisbacher approaches the communal housing projects through photography, text, archive images and a documentary film and thematises the relationships of the residents to the projects over the last 45 years. The work is a contemporary document of the potentially positive effects of architecture on social structures.

Julia Gaisbacher, born 1983 in Grambach near Graz (AT), lives as a freelance artist and photographer in Vienna and Graz. She studied art history at the Karl-Franzens-University Graz, sculpture/three-dimensional design at the Dresden University of Fine Arts (DE) and at the Hogeschool Sint-Lukas / LUCA School of Arts, Brussels (BE).
Julia Gaisbacher has received the Theodor Körner Fund Prize (2021), the State Photography Scholarship of the Austrian Federal Chancellery (2020), the Purchase Prize as part of the Styrian Promotion Prize for Contemporary Visual Arts (2019), the Erste Bank MehrWERT Art Recognition Prize (2018) and the City of Graz Photography Promotion Prize (2016).
In 2021, she published her book “One Day You Will Miss Me” with Camera Austria.