Six months in Vienna, six extraordinary residential buildings – that’s what Academy winner Franzisca Rainalter has set herself. Her series started with the Vienna housing project by the architecture firm einszueins. This month she visited a classic of social housing: the Karl-Marx Hof. My excursion this time goes to the “Grätzl” of the 19th district – Döbling. Right by the final stop […]
Six months in Vienna, six extraordinary residential buildings – that’s what Academy winner Franzisca Rainalter has set herself. Her series started with the Vienna housing project by the architecture firm einszueins. This month she visited a classic of social housing: the Karl-Marx Hof.
This time, my excursion takes me to the “Grätzl” of the 19th district – Döbling. Arriving directly at the final stop of the U4 underground line, you are already standing in front of the monumental central wing of the Karl-Marx-Hof. The “superblock” stretches for over a kilometer. I am standing right in the center of it – on what is now known as “12. February Platz” – which is formed by the recessed central wing and the six towers. The large square is lively: a few children are playing near a group of trees, older people are walking their dogs and a group of obvious tourists approach me with cameras. They are drawn here because the Karl-Marx-Hof is considered an icon of “Red Vienna”. The residential building was constructed between 1926 and 1933 according to plans by Karl Ehn as a prime example of a monumental “superblock”. As a counter-design to the garden city, the superblock is a “city within the city” with its own infrastructure.
Red Vienna emerged after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy. After the first free municipal elections in 1919, Vienna became the first city in the world with over a million inhabitants to be governed by a social democratic administration. This gave rise to a socio-political experiment that encompassed and reformed all areas of life for its inhabitants. From social and health policy to education and housing. The financial basis for the new housing projects was created by the then city councillor Hugo Breitner with a new tax system and various luxury levies. Between 1923 and 1934, over 380 municipal buildings with more than 64,000 apartments were built with the help of the “Breitner taxes”.
“You have to understand municipal buildings as a response to what existed before. As an attempt to remove everything that was bad.” Eve Blau
Red Vienna: Architecture 1919-1934 – City-Space-Politics, lecturer at Harvard University. Research focus: History and theory of modern architecture and urban planning.
The buildings from the times of Red Vienna are scattered all over the city. Many of them are passed by carelessly, despite their red lettering. Some stand inconspicuously in small gaps between Wilhelminian-style buildings, others tower upwards and form the center of a “Gräzl”. Viennese municipal housing was part of the city from the very beginning: not outsourced in front of or next to the city, but integrated and right in the middle of it.
The “new Vienna”
Most municipal buildings in Vienna do not look very modern on the outside. They stand out from the German and international buildings that were built at the same time, which were white and had flat roofs. Instead, municipal buildings were seen rationally, on a large scale, with high-tech and modern infrastructure. New materials and industrial prefabrication had no place in Viennese municipal buildings. Instead, the focus was on the traditional – namely brick. This was based less on architectural principles and more on socialist policy, which was able to create and secure jobs with this construction method.
Karl-Marx-Hof
The Karl-Marx-Hof was intended to create affordable living space. Living space with running water, private toilets and social facilities within easy reach were to contribute to a better life.
This resulted in 1,382 apartments for 5,000 people and numerous facilities such as two laundries with washing stalls, two bathrooms with baths and showers, two kindergartens, a mother’s advice center, a library, a health insurance company with an outpatient clinic and 25 other stores. The Karl-Marx-Hof site covers 156,027 square meters. Not even a fifth of this has been built on. Under the motto “light, air, sun”, around 80 percent of the area was left green and used for the divided open space. At the time, rents in the Karl-Marx-Hof amounted to around ten percent of a worker’s salary.
Access to the individual houses is located inside the superblock. Residents therefore had to cross one of the many inner courtyards to get to their apartments. When I arrive in one of the courtyards, I notice how it becomes quieter. The noise of the city is shut out; the sounds of a residential area become audible: children can be heard laughing and shouting from the nearby meadow and balconies, and radio music can be heard from one apartment or another. It’s the weekend and I come across many families with baby carriages and dogs. Some elderly people are sitting on the benches, enjoying the last rays of sunshine this fall.
The balconies in the inner courtyard, individually designed by the residents, make the superblock more tangible as an inhabited object and give an idea that life is taking place in the monumental building. People have still been living here side by side in the “Grätzl” of Vienna’s 19th district for almost a hundred years.
All pictures: Franzisca Rainalter
The Baumeister Academy is an internship project of the architecture magazine Baumeister and is supported by GRAPHISOFT and BAU 2019.
