2024-05-03T19:00:55-04:00 https://archinect.com/news/article/150282926/platform-takes-a-closer-look-into-one-of-20th-century-s-boldest-architectural-experiments Orhan Ayyüce 2021-09-27T14:34:00-04:00 >2022-03-14T10:33:02-04:00 <img src="https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/44/44917fb225a4b3035bdcb746a4aeb191.jpg?fit=crop&auto=compress%2Cformat&enlarge=true&w=1200" border="0" /><em><p>What we think of today as &ldquo;Red Vienna&rdquo; was, in many respects, a highly fragile, contingent, and audacious effort; it is little short of a minor miracle that so much decommodified housing was built at a time when reactionary Catholicism and fascist politics were ascendant on the national scale in Austria.</p></em><br /><br /><p>Penned by Joseph Heathcott for Platform, the article takes a closer look into one of the boldest architectural experiments of the twentieth century that can still be seen in Vienna today. Between 1923 and 1934, the socialist-controlled municipal government constructed over four hundred Hofs (housing courts) providing some 60,000 units of decent, affordable homes to one in eight residents of the city.</p> <p>Manfredo Tafuri argues that "Red Vienna" emerged out of the historical moment when the Austrian working class asserted its place in a nation fractured by the dissolution of the ancient regime. In his view, however, the municipal experiment in mass housing did not so much envision a new world as it did reconfigure bits of the extant city to include working-class residents. For Tafuri, this approach resulted in supposedly isolated and detached working-class neighborhoods, amounting to a failure of international revolutionary principle. But for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Blau" target="_blank">Eve Blau</a>, Tafuri misses the distinctly urban ...</p>