Seestadt Aspern – Seeparkquartier Baufeld J4

Vienna as a city structure is an obvious example of city’s resilience, either as social projects (Vienna Hofs) or as programmatically flexible large central Viennese apartment blocks. The character of both speculative and social housing is the typological simplicity, where relatively simple units can easily be adapted and readjusted to different and ever-changing programmatic requirements. As opposed to todays ‘over programmed’ apartment types they are open, simple spatial frameworks, allowing for change.

Can we imagine a part of the ‘new’ city, conceived in such a way so as to be able to embrace extremely diverse programmes, diverse ways of life, diverse social organizations, and to integrate it through development of complex social, yet simple structural solutions?


Seeparkquartier J4

The new block becomes an ‘accumulation’ of built structures, volumetrically and programmatically connected, lined – like a string of pearls – around the interior courtyard but permeable to the interior courtyard. The interior courtyard is an elevated platform/garden, raised one floor from the level of the ‘city’, connected to it via large access stairs/ramps. It is a hybrid of park and square, of park and terrace – a large wooden deck covered in greenery, very usable, yet very ‘green’. It is a kind of ‘glue’ that keeps the block together, both socially and formally.

The buildings – unlike the ‘traditional’ division of services and public spaces on the ground floor and the housing on the upper floors, they can be conceived as vertically mixed programmatic structures – scattered programmes throughout the buildings’ sections (of differing heights), with circulation concept that enables easy access to all floors of the buildings.

The units proposed – a large array of different units - are stacked vertically – becoming a kind of ‘vertical city’, an accumulation of different ‘open’ typologies using the changing sections of the buildings.

They offer a kind of New Age ‘redefinition’ of a famous Corbusian model of unite – as opposed to its idea of ‘one size fits all’, we propose a ‘unite of unites’, a stack of typologies where everyone is or can be different, live differently and use the ‘world’ differently – where unit can become the place of one’s personal definition.

Not one, universal, ideal model of a habitation, but an array, a vast sea of possible units, catering to different conditions and different lifestyles, allowing for different ways of use.So the vertical section reads like the city – studios, lofts, mini-lofts, student housing, row houses and townhouses, penthouses and workshops, hotels and hostels and Pied-a-Terre’s all become possible.

The units are thus configured – simple in plan, complex in section – becoming new ‘territories of habitation’, open for colonization with human life - the final definition of every unit becoming that of the individual user.

The complexity offered by the ‘real’ city is realised vertically. All of the buildings are ‘topped’ by the common green areas, a combination of common green, allotment gardens and glass-houses, stimulating the internal economy of the complex.

The image of Aspern project therefore is not built around the idea of ‘façade’, but around its programmatic structure and social complexity – the buildings, or floor configurations are nothing else but ‘frames’ for realization of potential lives, giving the building its final, complex and lively appearance.

The future of housing, therefore, does not lie in the multiplication of fixed, banal typological solutions, an aberration of the modernist idea the ‘everybody is the same and everybody wants the same’, nor does it lie in the excessive obsessions with sustainability based solely on energy consumption, or in the beautifully designed facades – the future of housing lies in different ‘format’ of sustainability, similar to the one offered by historical Viennese examples – finding new ‘open’ typological solutions that would result in lively, expressive and socially charged spatial condensations that we call cities.