Housing and Community Development

In the series Europe in Baltimore the D center currently shows an exhibit titled "The Vienna Model- Housing for the 21st Century" and opened with a "Design Conversation" which I moderated. Panelists were the head of Vienna Housing, Dr. Wolfgang Foerster, and local architects and designers Tom Liebel, FAIA and Art Kutcher. 

In the Vienna of the twenties, a city with tremendous housing shortages and all the resulting misery, Austria's brand of socialism provided an answer with policies that became known worldwide as the Vienna model of Social Housing. Modern Corbusier inspired architecture based on light, air and sun that put an end to narrow, dank and dark slums in the shadow of industrialization. Much of the new housing was placed in the periphery not in the historic core. This model has substantially remained in place to this day with far reaching consequences: Today about 60% of Vienna's resident's live in subsidized units. Thanks to high caliber architecture, the stock of social housing which has accumulated over the decades is cherished, and is undergoing careful rehabilitation.

The Alt Erlaa development from 1976 is the largest and maybe most  "Curbusian" Viennese social housing development with over 3,000 dwellings (photo: from exhibit) Add caption The 1954 Lexington Terrace and Murphy Homes developments (above top left) look benign in comparison to Erlaa (ArchPlan Archive) Baltimore Lafayette Courts in its best days shortly after completion The demolition of the Baltimore housing highrise projects was a celebrated event (1996)

Contrast this with St Louis, Chicago, or Baltimore where big public housing blocks based on "light, air and sun" were all the rage some 30 years later than in Vienna and after a flood of veterans came back home from WW II.