Flexible housing

Expectations were high. The building developer competition “generations : housing on the mühlgrund” looked for innovative typologies to provide answers to demographic developments. As a result of the extension of the U2 metro line the location, once regarded as the urban periphery, is now just a twenty-minute train ride from the city centre station Volkstheater and has become far more attractive. The architecture of the new stations by Paul Katzberger is also most successful.

In 2007 the Vienna Housing Fund set up a generation-specific competition for three sites. The first lies in the shadow of the elevated metro line, near Stadlau station. For this situation ARTEC (Bettina Goetz and Richard Manahl) together with the developer BUWOG developed a 90-metre-long urban block. On the northern side a dark metal façade folded like an accordion screens the building from noise. Behind this glass-perforated skin there are several storeys of planted decks that serve as winter gardens, access to the apartments and a kind of communal living room. All the apartments have balconies and loggias on the quiet, sunny south side.

The metro is not particularly loud; this block forms a kind of habitable noise protection wall for the buildings on the adjoining site B. This site runs from north to south and is almost two hundred metres long. The approach road in the east leads along the embankment of a nature conservation area, where building is not allowed. This meadow provides an ideal children’s play space. The path on the western edge is lined by old allotment garden houses standing behind flowers, shrubs and hedges. In the north, where the road describes a curve, the site is almost 70 metres wide, tapering to 35 metres at the southern end. The zoning plan stipulated building class 1, which means a building height ranging from 2.5 to a maximum of 9 metres.

The three architects Hermann Czech, Adolf Krischanitz and Werner Neuwirth, divided up the site democratically into three, equally-sized parts and formed a team. The developer was the EBG; the green areas were designed by Anna Detzlhofer. “The spatial combinations are not generation-specific. Rooms with their own exits or connecting mini studio flats could be used by young people, by the elderly or by people in need of nursing care”, explains Hermann Czech. “An apartment building must be able to react to the different paths that a life takes.” Their project won the competition and was built. Hermann Czech was born in 1936, Adolf Krischanitz is ten years younger, and Werner Neuwirth used to work for him. The three of them represent different generations of architects and were more interested in making a real contribution to housing than in meeting any expectations based on a buzz word.

A shared dislike of rendered, thermally insulated facades led to the use of wooden battens and a number of guideline details that are employed throughout the complex. The load-bearing frame and floor slabs are of reinforced concrete that offers excellent thermal insulation and protection from noise. The walls are insulated sandwich constructions, externally all the buildings were clad with rough-sawn larch battens. The window frames and reveals are also of wood, the parapets are galvanized steel. Between the storeys there is a clean separating joint along which water can drain off; the quality of the detailing is very high.

The wood gives the complex a specific character that allows it to be recognised and experienced as a coherent whole. The living ageing raw material is excellently suited to generation housing, the nature conservation area and the green surroundings – in addition to which the use of wood connects the different architectural signatures. (...)
Isabella Marboe

The article in full length and more pictures can be found in architektur.aktuell