After successful completion of the course, students are able to formulate independent positions on architectural questions by means of independent research and to express these by means of concrete designs. They have the competence to recognise and point out spatial fields of action and to address them with architectural and artistic means. The students collect independent research and topic-related basics. They create analyses, design concepts and comprehensively present them in the form of plans, drawings, photographs and models and practise presenting and depicting them convincingly.
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 analyzing a range of spatial conditions, from the typology of apartments to the landscaping of the Hof and 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 a week-long workshop by Matthias Moroder and Sebastian Bietenhader of Büro Bietenhader Moroder. The reception of Red Vienna up until the present will be analyzed through readings and discussions. Against this overview Büro Bietenhader Moroder will outline their novel re-reading of Red Vienna’s architecture following their contention that Red Vienna actually successfully managed to produce its own formal articulation of a non-modern public architecture that embraces intentional formal sameness as an emancipatory quality. This new re-reading of Red Vienna will be illustrated through presentations, two field trips to Red Vienna sites, as well as through short massing and facade modeling exercises in clay.
*Guest critic Pier Vittorio Aureli
Application:
Send us your portfolio
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 Bauer’s book “The Road to Socialism” (1919)
- The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of the First Republic of Austria.
- 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 economic 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.
Kick off October 4th 10:00 am, FOB Raumgestaltung und Entwerfen, White Cube, Stiege 10, 4. OG, RAUM AC0424
Workshop October 9-13 all day
Meetings weekly on Wednesday 9:30-13:30
Midterms 15.12
Finals 31.1.24
