Description
The Hadikgasse residential complex, planned between 1970 and 1972 and completed in 1976, is a remarkable example in a series of experimental, high-quality residential complexes, all of them social housing by Harry Glück & Partner, one of the busiest architectural firms in Austria at the time. By the late 1990s, largely commissioned by the social housing association GESIBA, the firm had designed some 14,000 residential units, 6,000 of which were in stepped terraced housing complexes. The structures used cross wall construction and efficient layouts to restrict the space taken up by access areas and elevators to a minimum, thereby saving funds that could be reinvested in equipping the apartments with loggias, terraces, and concrete planters, as well as in communal facilities such as rooftop swimming pools and sundecks, and in shared greenspaces. In the 1970s, Harry Glück & Partner worked on an average of five housing estates per year, including Heinz-Nittel-Hof, Alt-Erlaa and Inzersdorfer Strasse. The firm collaborated closely with municipal authorities, for example, to close a road or rezone a street into a pedestrian area. It was even possible that an underground station be relocated or entire building volumes be reallocated, as was the case with the Hadikgasse housing estate. The building site is located in the west of Vienna, in Penzing, Vienna’s 14th district, at the foot of the Wiental (Vienna River valley). The site is surrounded on three sides by streets, including the busy arterial road of Hadikgasse to the south and an urban railway station. The site is on a slope, which is four meters higher in the north. To the west, a four-story Gründerzeit-era perimeter block development encloses a generous U-shaped greenspace. The site for the estate occupied 8,400 m2.
The project is a strictly orthogonal, a classic bar building and a slab floating above a platform. The front is low, the rear almost three times as high, with little reference to the surrounding building fabric. A foreign body, so to speak, yet well incorporated, open, bright, friendly and urban. It was conceived as a platform of approximately 86 meters square, with a curved sound insulation barrier five meters above the level of Hadikgasse. This rim is actually an enormous plant trough, with poplar trees, continuing the facade of the neighboring block as a kind of green wall. Under this platform, space was made for a petrol station, two tennis halls, and a double-story underground car park. Above this, indented by 12 meters, a four-story bar-shaped block extends across the entire width. Protected by the sound insulation at the perimeter, this creates a further screen against the traffic noise. The second structure is a 12-story slab of equal length, situated in a quieter location, parallel to the first bar building and 26 meters apart from it. A covered walkway on the ground floor leads to the shops and connects the external walkways to the courtyard and the block. The greenery and trees between the bar building and the slab expand into the street.
Exterior view towards Hadikgasse.
Both wings are 18 meters deep and are offset from each other by half a story at the center. Sixteen cross wall partitions determine the length of the wings. The loadbearing structure is like an open shelf made of reinforced concrete with cross walls that are 5.7 meters apart and only 2.72 meters high. There are 45 “cubbies” in the three-story block and 165 in the 11 stories of the slab. This corresponds to the number of apartments. The finishing elements were largely prefabricated. The ribbon windows, all opening pivot sashes, are made of utile wood, a plantation wood from West Africa widely in use at the time. The soffits in the foyers and loggias were insulated with exposed cork panels and the parapets are prefabricated, insulated panels with integrated shading.
Facade-to-facade apartments accessed via central stairwells would have required a great number of stairways and elevators and result in a loss of space, while a central corridor on every floor would have generated an undesirably high number of north-facing apartments. What was needed was an efficient access circulation that would combine the advantages of both systems.
One could see the chosen access system as a further development of Le Corbusier’s Unités d’Habitation, even more efficient thanks to the split level, which allows a third more apartments to connect to the central corridor. By offsetting the floors of the mezzanine levels at about the center of the building, each corridor provides access to around 45 apartments. The apartments are entered from the central corridor via a landing-wide foyer and a staircase with eight steps, from where the private rooms are reached. These rooms receive either morning or evening sunlight via a corner window and include a bathroom, toilet, and storage space. Eight steps in the opposite direction lead to the kitchen and living room with loggia and planter to the south. This works both downwards and upwards. These three-story units are accessed by a continuous 86-meter-long corridor. Thirty apartments are inserted in split-level floors, with lighting from both sides, while 15 are single-story, south-facing apartments with daylight on one side. The central corridor is accessed via an elevator inside the building and a stair tower on the exterior. Both also provide access to a 25-meter-long swimming pool on the roof with shared terraces.
The slab structure is made up of four stacked modules, with the lowest one comprising only thirty apartments, as the ground floor is not used for residential purposes. The two building entrances are located in the courtyard and connected by a covered walkway. 165 apartments are accessed by two elevators, two staircases, and four corridors.
Interior view.
60 of these apartments are barrier-free, mini apartments of 33 m2 (including loggia). The others are three or five-room, split-level apartments or maisonettes ranging from 84 to 122 m2 in size. All living spaces open to the south and two thirds of them have a view into the distance. The lack of apartments with two or four rooms is due to the system and the rigid structure.
On the exterior, the Hadikgasse residential complex focuses on the individual in serial prefabrication and on the facade as an open space for appropriation. This layer, up to three meters deep, can be used for living and planted with greenery. The cross walls penetrating the building envelope are used as a design element while providing privacy, shading, and fire protection. Between the walls are loggias and flowering shrubs and bushes growing in concrete planters, along with bands of bay-like windows between white parapets, shaded by awnings.
The north side, with continuous ribbon windows regularly folded to create bay windows with white parapets is starkly different. Lack of privacy at the corner windows is prevented by the cross walls, which pierce the ribbon windows to protrude far out from the bay windows. Two massive stair towers, shifted five meters from the building, open up the four corridors with bridges that penetrate the facade on every third floor. The front sides are closed, like firewalls, and all four have a vertical, semi-circular shaft affixed to the exterior.
Originally published in: Gerhard Steixner, Maria Welzig (eds.), Luxury for All. Milestones in European Stepped Terrace Housing, Birkhäuser, 2020. Translated by Anna Roos, abridged and edited for Building Types Online.