Description

This project description is an excerpt from the longer article “Housing Special Populations”. For a comparative analysis and further data on this and all other categories including accompanying graphs, please see the article “A Turning Point”.

Miss Sargfabrik is located in Vienna, Austria, which has had a housing history where cost-rent limited-profit housing has played a strong role. The origins date back to the early twentieth century, symbolized by gemeindebau projects such as Karl-Marx-Hof where the apartments are rented from the respective municipality. Similar housing schemes gained currency in the post-World War II era despite trends in public policy and mortgage markets that have promoted more individualized forms of housing consumption. Rental housing at present constitutes 45 percent of the housing stock in Austria, largely with the social sector, including limited-profit rental associations, co-operations, and municipal housing providers, overseeing the housing investment, management, and consumption. In Vienna alone, almost 200 municipal and limited-profit providers account for 48 percent of all dwellings, and this is supported by the Austrian Federal Government’s provision of grants and public loans for affordable cost-capped housing. [1]  The striking Miss Sargfabrik with its bold orange façade is emblematic of the cost-rent limited-profit housing common in Vienna and was designed by BKK-3 in 1998 and completed in 2000. Like Quinta Monroy, Miss Sargfabrik was committed to participatory design strategies and community engagement: during the two-year planning process, BKK-3 initiated discussions and brainstorming sessions with the 30 to 50 potential tenants to find out their personal desires as well as communal aspirations, and ways in which the building would still be functional in 20 years’ time. [2] The social element hence was at the very core of this housing collective.

The residential complex of Miss Sargfabrik is located more specifically in the Penzing District (Fourteenth District) on the western edge of the city, within walking distance to Penzing Station and other nearby underground metro stops, and set within a fabric of perimeter block courtyard houses with abundant green spaces in the form of courtyard gardens, parks, and forests. What is notable about the project is that it is the second of collective residential complexes designed by BKK, the first of which was Sargfabrik, meaning coffin factory, and housed 110 units. The original coffin factory buildings on the site were demolished and the site redeveloped for a communal residential complex which was completed in 1996. Both of these projects were undertaken by the Verein für Integrative Lebensgestaltung (VIL) or the Association for Integrative Living – a body that was founded by a group of people in 1987 who shared a common dissatisfaction with the increasing costs of housing as well as the traditional range of standardized dwellings. [3]
They thus set up a cooperative building company that would allow them to create a model of “Living–Culture–Integration”, and this autonomy consequently allowed BKK to design and build independently of the real estate market. On joining the cooperative, tenants pay a set amount per square metre as a deposit, which is refunded when they leave. The rental per month includes all the running and heating costs. [4] In May 1989, the VIL purchased what was once the largest coffin factory in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Maschner & Söhne, a company established at the end of the nineteenth century that had ceased production in 1970. The success and positive experience of Sargfabrik as a “Village within a City” prompted the Association to purchase yet another piece of real estate just across the street along Missindorfstrasse in 1998, which was redeveloped into Miss Sargfabrik. [5]

The project covered an area of 850 square meters, and occupied the corner of a perimeter block construction, housing 45 adults and 12 children. The 12-meter-deep building essentially wraps around the site, retaining the integrity and urban design features of a perimeter block while recreating a courtyard within the building with a shared garden, providing an oasis of calm that harkens back to the old Viennese courtyards that are especially renowned in the city’s first district. The covered outdoor entry hall connects the street directly to the courtyard, and stairwells on both ends of the building lead up to the access galleries. In designing the complex, the architects focused on long-term programs, eliminating the notion of sleeping units per se, and created apartments around a pattern of sleeping, working and living. In fact, on the ground level, five units have atelier-like features for home offices, and the open spaces of the small units are developed from the external access corridor. Service cores are arrayed to the center of the party walls together with the staircases, thus yielding additional space efficiencies and organizational flexibilities within the units. The variety of unit plans here was derived by the unusual, angular ways in which BKK-3 determined the party walls as well as the introduction of split-levels within the building. Every second party wall is bent like a splayed ‘V’ so that the apartments are alternately wide at the center and narrower at the glazed front or the other way around, creating a perspective that makes the flats seem larger than they are. [6]
The units range in size from 30 to 70 square meters, with the intention of including singles as well as families in the project. [7]  In keeping with the goal of accommodating a diverse community, three of the units are adapted for disabled persons in wheelchairs with the access corridor and entrance of the building designed to be barrier-free, and small apartments called “Flex Boxes” are let to students for a period of one year. [8] There are a total of nine floors, including one underground level with three parking spaces, and penthouses at the very top. The first floor is also raised above ground level. The heights of each floor vary from 2.26 meters to 3.12 meters, which are in fact higher than the low ceilings of conventional buildings. The spatial structure of the interior is expressed on the façade in the form of folded and expanding ribbons of windows, particularly for the split-levels. Apart from the library, the building also houses BKK-3’s own office, an apartment for teenagers in the care of the Office for Youth and Family of the City of Vienna, a communal kitchen, laundry room, and computer room. These communal spaces are the focal point within the building complex and are situated on the two levels that interlock with entrances at both levels. Within the broader framework of subsidized housing in Vienna, Miss Sargfabrik and Sargfabrik have earned critical acclaim as radical yet highly successful experiments in the contemporary era, although in the longer history of communal housing, compared for instance to those undertaken in the Soviet Union, they are perhaps not as avant-garde as they might appear.

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Originally published in: Peter G. Rowe, Har Ye Kan, Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories, Birkhäuser, 2014.