Ilana Razbash

Ilana Razbash is an artist and registered architect in Victoria with nearly a decade of experience across public, education, community, and health projects. Through Studio Razbash, she delivers thoughtful, audio and sensory-focused design. Ilana is also an educator and hosts Radio Architecture on Radio Carrum.

Razbash’s debut exhibition Architectures in C Major offers a deeply evocative intersection of architecture, sound, and sacred landscape. Through seven oil paintings, Razbash stages a conversation between the built and the ephemeral, conjuring structures that are as much auditory as they are spatial. Set along the luminous twilight of Edithvale Beach where she lives, each canvas captures a fleeting moment in light, colour, and vibration, a symphonic meditation rendered in oil.

At the core of Razbash’s inquiry lies Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, a hymn composed in the key of C major. Her process both analytical and devotional: using vibration visualisation and laser mapping, Razbash translates sonic frequencies into architectural geometries. Seven notes, some absent from Cohen’s harmonic structure yet essential to the completeness of the major scale, are drawn from alternative chord formations. These become the blueprints for imagined buildings, their forms shaped not by function but by frequency. The resulting compositions oscillate between utopian monument and spiritual mirage.

Each painting is a portal. The architectural forms, deftly built from sound itself, are imposed into landscapes plein-air painted across seven consecutive sunset evenings. Razbash’s restrained but confident brushwork infuses these canvases with a sense of ritual; light is both subject and substance. In this context, architecture is not anchored to ground or gravity, but floats as an emotional resonance. With their elongated silhouettes, cantilevered masses, and spectral translucencies, the buildings channel echoes of Oscar Niemeyer’s modernist lyricism or Zaha Hadid’s visionary fluidity. Yet unlike the triumphant assertions of 20th-century modernism, these structures are quiet, inward, reverent.

The absence of human figures intensifies the contemplative stillness of each work. The spaces are uninhabited, yet they hum with presence, an invitation to spiritual dwelling rather than physical occupancy. In one painting, a soft pink dusk dissolves the boundary between sea and sky, the architecture reduced almost to a whisper. In another, a crimson beam reflects across mirrored glass, its source unseen, its effect deeply felt. These buildings, born from Cohen’s melody and scripture’s breath, appear as prayers made manifest, temporary temples in a landscape of impermanence.

Biblical allusions deepen the conceptual resonance. The artist invokes Psalm 33:6  “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made”, and the Genesis moment when “God said, ‘Let there be light.” This is not simply architecture in service of faith, but architecture as faith: the spoken word becomes vibration, the vibration becomes form, the form becomes painting. Razbash's process thus recapitulates creation itself.

There is a tension here, however, that resists simple harmony. The paintings engage in a quiet critique of architectural legacy. As viewers, we sense the fragility of these forms, monuments not for conquest, but for their ephemeral beauty,  to weather in silence. The seascapes ground the works in time and place, yet the buildings seem unstuck, almost apparitional. In this way, Architectures in C Major may be read as a poetic eulogy for a kind of sacred modernity that was never fully realised.

Importantly, Razbash’s work reclaims and reimagines Jewish architecture beyond the physical synagogue or inherited typology. Through this series, she opens up a space for sonic, spiritual, and diasporic forms of dwelling, ones that do not need to conform to historical models of permanence or monumentality. This is a subtle, sophisticated contribution to the broader dialogue around Jewish visual culture and the politics of visibility in architecture.

As a painter-architect specialising in acoustics and sound, Razbash stands at the threshold of multiple disciplines. Her practice, grounded in research and rigorous conceptual method, never loses sight of the poetic. 

Architectures in C Major is not a project of illustration, but of revelation. Each work functions as a translation, of music into geometry, of emotion into structure, of light into sacred trace. In an era where space and sound are increasingly politicised, her canvases offer a counterpoint: a quiet, luminous space to pause, to breathe, to dwell.