"Vienna’s charm lies not only in the beauty of its architecture or the vastness of its cultural history, but in the way its soul is present in every corner, as though the past and present conspire to create something ungraspable, yet deeply felt." 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1903

Vienna is a city forged by public housing. 

More than just providing places to live, public housing policies have been a political instrument to suggest a different city and thus a different life. From the socialist vision of Red Vienna in the 1920s to today’s massive public constructions, housing has continuously been at the heart of Vienna’s transformation: unlike many European cities, Vienna never abandoned the quest for a ‘dwelling for all’. Visiting its urban fabric means engaging with stories of spatial strategies, social ambitions and the invariant capacity of good architecture to immanently inform our everyday life.

The legacy of Red Vienna in the 1920s laid the path for a model that remains unique, in the West, in its scale and ambition —one where municipal initiatives, strategic land policies, and architectural experimentation converged to produce a city built around collective access to good living conditions. As Manfredo Tafuri shows in his Red Vienna: The Residential Policy in Socialist Vienna 1919-1934, the massive Gemeindebauten, with their fortress-like forms and communal amenities—schools, libraries, healthcare facilities—were meant to cultivate a new kind of collective urban life. Housing was the manifestation a different idea of society.

Yet Tafuri sees in Gemeindebauten a paradox: despite their social ambition, they often replicated the very structures of control and hierarchy they sought to overcome. The monumental scale and rigid layouts of many mega-projects seemed to suggest a paternalistic authority rather than true grassroots empowerment. Were these projects truly radical, or did they impose a different, yet conservative, form of spatial discipline? Did they offer a genuine alternative to bourgeois housing, or did they remain trapped within formalising the aesthetics of (another) power? Was the city's housing massive policy ultimately absorbed by the very system it sought to resist? 

This paradox extends to Vienna’s today architecture and these tensions are nothing new. From Camillo Sitte’s picturesque urbanism, through Wagner’s Großstadt and Loos’ frontal assault on ornamental frivolity and cultural stagnation —a rejection of everything Vienna had been— until viennese postmodernity and its anti-intellectualism, Vienna has been built upon foundations of grandeur and decay, of seclusion and interiors, of tradition and nostalgia: the capital of an empire that is not there (anymore) struggles to embody a true public face, strangling the very innovations the city claims to embrace.

When we think architectonically, what can we learn from Vienna? And how is Vienna’s housing model behaving today? Beyond its political narratives and ideological masks, we must ask: how is collective housing forming today’s Vienna’s architectonic nature? Is Vienna’s housing model truly progressive, or does it risk becoming another monument of its own city’s self-mythologizing? Can it still open architectural perspectives for Vienna, or will this latter be condemned to remain a "tattooed city”?

By considering heroic viennese “housing” projects as inexhaustible models for architectural reflection —from Fischer Von Erlach’s baroque palaces, to the Höfe blocks or the more dispersed Siedlung settlements, until recent and contemporary samples— we will explore how certain crucial projects have reimagined ways of living and collective spatial experiences. The studio will spin around the intriguing hypothesis that ‘housing +‘ could truly discover and affirm ways of inhabiting the city, in which architecture does not hide, symbolically, behind its program or its ornament.