The Hoover Apartment Building is part of the collection of the Centraal Museum Utrecht (NL)
'... In his work, Halmans often explores the domestic world and sees a home as a place where life fluctuates between a public and a private sphere. Halmans examines how we as humans live in these two different areas. One could call the artist a 'house expert': he is an accomplished carpenter, plumber and bricklayer and therefore knows everything about houses. Within his work, however, houses or parts of them assume a kind of dream shape. In this respect, his series of "architectural vacuum cleaners" reflects his vision well. For this series, the artist converted a few vacuum cleaners into small architectural households with separate rooms, emphasizing their personal character. In this way the artist built machines that we usually use to keep our households clean, into individual and individual objects. The dirt is now effectively sucked up and can be seen as a metaphor for everything that we collectively collect in both our memories and in the physical translation of them into objects in our house.
Quote from the text at the 'Watou Art Festival 2014 - About small happiness in times of abundance'
Publication vzw P'art, Schore (BE) 2014