The semester will be taught in English, with guest critic Pier Vittorio Aureli.
This design studio will study the ideological premise of Red Vienna in order to represent the architecture it created. We understand the housing blocks of Red Vienna as socialist islands that are floating within the capitalist city. In that sense, they are not dissimilar from the ideology that shaped them, an ideology that saw the gradual infiltration into politics as the answer to capitalism–rather than its complete and immediate abolition through revolution. This strategic changing of the capitalist system from within is then parallel to the apartment typology of Red Vienna, where various domestic functions were allocated to the shared spaces of the block. Indeed, the Hof created a new interior urbanism between the apartment, the courtyard, the streets and the city, forming a gradient of civic, commercial and domestic spaces that challenged the speculative bourgeois city.
This studio will examine this ideology by analysing a range of spatial conditions, from the typology of apartments to the landscaping of the Hof as well as the maintenance of shared spaces. Students will also compare changes that took place over the years to the apartment configuration in order to understand the evolving needs of residential space, including the question of the nuclear family model vs. new forms of communal, intergenerational, or singular dwelling.
*The studio will also include workshops by Matthias Moroder and Sebastian Bietenhader, composed of field trips around Vienna, model making, joint readings, and discussions.
*Guest critic Pier Vittorio Aureli
Methods
The semester will be taught in English.
This design studio will result in a series of visual and textual representations undertaken throughout the semester. This includes drawings, diagrams, photographs, films, essays and interviews. These representations will form a study of Red Vienna that would increase the visual literacy of the project and make visible the spatial ideology it embodies.
In parallel with the research and design phases of the studio, students will be asked to prepare a weekly lecture on a topic of their choice relating to Red Vienna, for example:
A brief overview Austro-Marxism and a summary of Otto
The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of the First Republic of Austria. Bauer’s book “The Road to Socialism” (1919)
Facades of red Vienna: ornaments and monumentality.
Technology and labour in Red Vienna: brick vs. concrete
Red Vienna as a Municipal rather than State project
The economical model of Red Vienna: taxation rather than loans, property withdrawal rather than expropriation.
The urbanism of Red Vienna: construction of the Gürtel as the proletarian Ring
Outside – inside relations and the Hof.
Comparison to other examples of the same period in Europe and Soviet Russia.
Supervisors
Wilfried Kuehn
Gili Merin
Matthias Moroder
Sebastian Bietenhader
Further information
Kick-Off: Wed. 4th October 2023, 10.00 a.m., FOB Raumgestaltung und Entwerfen, White Cube, Stiege 3, 4. OG