Tuesday, February 23, 2016

VIENNA: HOUSING EXPERIMENTS

Due to increasing complexity of metros and large urban areas, the planning mechanism has perhaps not able to resolve through mechanism of entrepreneurial market or mechanism of politics. The planning commissions and functions seem to be insufficient to tackle the fundamental issues of housing within metros and large urban areas. The planning without empowered function in formal sense cannot be effective. Marx provided the useful framework related to the planning functions of the city and issues related at large with the society, where he contended that in truest form of the man leads double life namely life of political community and life in bourgeois society. The attempt to gain advantage in planning is to have welfare of the individual within the community and society at large so that relationship between two important functions becomes positive ones. The question of social strategy and political feasibility to assess the changes in institutional framework and ideas needs practical steps towards the handling of housing for large urban areas. The context of such endeavor lies in changing nature of relationship that individual has with the formal state and society. 


Perhaps the housing in large metropolis of Vienna has historically address this question and examined the relation of individual and society as a nature of state, which represent the interest of bourgeois and society. This attitude could prove useful to contemporary methods of planning processes and development of individualistic ideas and institutional framework in housing.

The Vienna housing records the trajectory of imperatives that has caused such typological imagination. The Red Vienna exhibition of housing (Nickname of the capital of Austria between 1918 and 1934. The Social Democrats had the majority and the city was democratically governed for the first time). records the architects work in housing with diverse typology attempting to address the housing issues of the city. 


The social housing was imagined as a city within a city and was usually built as peripheral block developments: a large gateway led into the often landscaped interior large open spaces, from which the individual stairways and apartments were accessed. The housing were built with regulated amenities such as swimming pools, supermarkets, Laundromats, and kindergartens were frequently situated in the common buildings.


Another experiment that was carried out was WERKBUND HOUSING. It is an experimental housing scheme in the outskirts of Vienna originally constructed under the guidance of the architect Josef Frank between 1930 and 1932. It was founded in Germany in 1907 the Deutscher Werkbund, or German Work Federation, was an association of architects, designers, and industrialists interested in modern architecture and industrial design, an influential group that later became important in the creation of the Bauhaus school of design (Source . http://architectuul.com/architecture/werkbund-housing-vienna). The aim was to achieve economy in the smallest space and functional solutions. 


The experiments continue to evolve around various experiments in large scale development or re-vitalization of an existing neighborhood. The formation of Urban Renewal Cell is an attempt to rejuvenate the existing housing stock with new addition and restoration.



RED VIENNA

WERKBUND ESTATE
 







URBAN RENEWAL PROJECT




























































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