Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
After two years, Vienna has overtaken Auckland as the world’s most livable city, according to a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
The EIU said that Auckland’s position on the index dipped to the 34th spot this year because of higher Covid-19 infection rates and strict border controls in 2021. Although lockdowns ended in New Zealand in December, well-vaccinated cities in Europe and Canada had begun easing restrictions earlier.
— CNBC
The Austrian capital was joined by Copenhagen, Zurich, Geneva, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam as the other European cities on the list. Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, Osaka, and Melbourne rounded out the Top 10 of the 172-city sampling. The Russian invasion of Ukraine also impacted the makeup of the... View full entry
Austria-based architecture office querkraft has completed an IKEA furniture store in the country’s capital Vienna, whose exterior was inspired by bookcases. Designed as a car-free venue, the scheme was developed with the vision of being a “good neighbor” for the surrounding community through... View full entry
French firm Studio Malka Architecture has announced a new project that will see the addition of a striking collection of curved, modular extensions to the French Embassy in Vienna, Austria. Built in the early 20th century, the embassy is situated within two buildings that express an Art... View full entry
What we think of today as “Red Vienna” 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. — PLATFORM
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... View full entry
![All images courtesy of [applied] Foreign Affairs. Photo by Juergen Strohmayer.](https://archinect.imgix.net/uploads/dc/dc5b666d1adccc5af343c18ab8a74061.jpg?fit=crop&auto=compress%2Cformat&w=514 "All images courtesy of [applied] Foreign Affairs. Photo by Juergen Strohmayer.")
The New Guabuliga Market is a recent design-build project that has been underway from [applied] Foreign Affairs ([a]FA), a transdisciplinary lab at the Institute of of Architecture of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Based on research done back in 2018, a team of students designed this... View full entry
The querkraft-designed store seeks to create a friendly, open, unconventional, and informal experience for users. The new building will be situated in an urban setting, and with no allotted parking, customers are expected to arrive by means of public transportation. The structure will be... View full entry
On the EIU’s index, which ranks 140 cities on 30 factors bunched into five categories—stability, health care, culture and environment, education and infrastructure—Vienna scores a near-perfect 99.1 out of 100, putting it just ahead of Melbourne. [...] Higher crime rates and ropey infrastructure pull some bigger cities like London, New York and Paris down the league table, despite their cultural and culinary attractions. — The Economist
Having seemingly cracked the 'perfect-city' formula, Vienna, once again, has topped a major global livability ranking. As The Economist reports, the Austrian capital scored a "near-perfect 99.1 out of 100," followed immediately by its perennial quality-of-life rival, Melbourne. Unsurprisingly, the... View full entry
Trade tensions and populist undercurrents continue to dominate the global economic climate. Combined with the spectre of monetary policy tightening and volatility looming over markets, international businesses are under more pressure than ever to get their overseas operations right. [...]
Globally, Vienna tops the ranking for the 10th year running, closely followed by Zurich (2).
— Mercer
The annual Mercer Quality of Living survey with the world's most desirable cities for business professionals to relocate to was recently released in its 2019 edition, and the field of top-ranked locations has not changed much compared to previous years: 1st: Vienna, Austria 2nd: Zurich... View full entry
With its affordable and attractive places to live, the Austrian capital is fast becoming the international gold standard when it comes to public housing, or what Europeans call “social housing” ― in Vienna’s case, government-subsidized housing rented out by the municipality or nonprofit housing associations. Unlike America’s public housing projects, which remain unloved and underfunded... — huffingtonpost.com
In Vienna 62% of its citizens reside in public housing, standing in stark contrast with less than 1% living in US social housing. The Austrian capital boasts regulated rents and strongly protects tenant's rights, while US public housing functions as a last resort for low-income individuals... View full entry
3XN and Austrian firm GERNER GERNER PLUS unveiled a new aquarium scheme titled “Poseidon's Realm”, which won second place in an international competition of the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna (A winner is yet to be announced). Working with aquarium specialists ATT, the team designed the... View full entry
Despite increased political and financial volatility in Europe, many of its cities offer the world’s highest quality of living and remain attractive destinations for expanding business operations and sending expatriates on assignment, according to Mercer’s 19th annual Quality of Living survey. [...]
Vienna occupies first place for overall quality of living for the 8th year running, with the rest of the top-ten list mostly filled by European cities.
— Mercer
The latest annual Mercer Quality of Living survey with the world's most desirable cities for business professionals to relocate to was recently released, and the ten top contenders are mostly the same familiar players: Vienna, AustriaZurich, SwitzerlandAuckland, New ZealandMunich... View full entry
This is a two-part series on housing policy in Vienna and how it could be a model for progressive housing policy in Seattle, where I live, or other American cities struggling with affordable housing. The first part is an overview of financing and subsidies. Part two, coming tomorrow, looks in detail at how zoning and development supports housing affordability. — cityobservatory.org
Mike Eliason, passivhaus designer with Seattle-based Patano Studio, penned an insightful two-part commentary for City Observatory, looking at issues of financing, zoning, affordability, sustainability, and quality of life in a side-by-side comparison of Vienna and Seattle. View full entry
Both Vienna and Budapest can be viewed as battlefields in an unfolding European crisis of identity and confidence that threatens the continent’s political unity and raises fundamental questions about what exactly it means to be European, to be Europe. Can we read these crises at the level of architecture? — Places Journal
In light of contemporary political turmoil in the region, Owen Hatherley examines key moments in the architectural histories of two quintessentially European cities, from the development of Vienna's monumental public housing to Budapest's experimentation with an ethnonationalist style. View full entry
After the University of Applied Arts Vienna chose a winner for its campus redesign competition in 2012, the proposal is just now being made a reality—much to the disappointment of another prominent Viennese institution, Coop Himmelb(l)au.The University selected Riepl Kaufmann Bammer... View full entry
Green Light is an artistic workshops that responds to the current situation in Europe, in which countless refugees are caught up in legal and political limbo. Together with TBA21 in Vienna, Olafur Eliasson has invited people from different backgrounds – refugees and locals – to take part in... View full entry
