Description

“It is the most revolutionary housing project of the City of Vienna since the construction of the Karl-Marx-Hof,” proclaimed the widely read weekly news magazine Profil in 1976.[1] It referred to the Marco Polo Terraces, as the project was originally called, with swimming pools on the roof, high-quality terrace apartments and infrastructure for leisure activities, education, health, and culture embedded in car-free, spacious, park-like greenspaces. For the first time, a municipal housing estate was to be constructed by a private housing company. The building authority of the City of Vienna had come under increasing criticism for its poor performance in terms of housing quality and operating costs. It was, above all, Harry Glück’s buildings for private co-operatives that made the difference with the settlements built by the state so starkly visible. One of the busiest architects in Austria at the time, his Vienna-based firm Harry Glück & Partner (Harry Glück, Werner Höfer, Rudolf Neyer, Tadeusz Spychala, and Karl Pethö) had realized almost 40 residential complexes by 1976, employing at times around a hundred people.

So Glück personally vouched for adherence to the construction schedule and guaranteed the budget. However, his demand that the City of Vienna permanently transfer responsibilities of its building authority to GESIBA, a non-profit housing association likewise owned by the City of Vienna, gained him powerful opponents in the city government. It was argued that the residents of traditional municipal apartments might be outraged if they were not also given swimming pools. Remarking that the Karl-Marx-Hof had also been revolutionary for its time, Mayor of Vienna Leopold Gratz elegantly responded to the argument. The Heinz Nittel project, eventually approved, was to be a prototype for future Viennese municipal housing. Red Vienna’s 1920s and 1930s buildings owe their international reputation to the radical social program underlying them.[2] By more than halving building density compared to the Gründerzeit era of the late 19th century, this political and humanitarian program was successfully implemented on a large scale within 10 years. The Karl-Marx-Hof was the prototype for the buildings of Red Vienna and is known above all for its striking appearance and its scale. Not readily apparent from the outside, the orientation of all apartments is towards quiet pedestrian greenspaces with light, air, and sun and community facilities. Marco Polo Terraces, built 50 years later, picks up on this precedent, with a similar program and number of apartments, but with a leap in quality in the apartments, open spaces, and the communal facilities. Whereas there were once wading pools in the courtyard for children, there are now swimming pools and sundecks for everyone on the roof. The housing complex is like a residential machine, a highly efficient structure.

The building site of the Heinz-Nittel-Hof is located in Floridsdorf, a former working-class district on the northern outskirts of Vienna. The sun-facing strip is approximately one kilometer long, 130 to 150 meters wide, and is bordered to the west by Brünner Strasse, an important arterial road, and to the east by Ruthnergasse. A former field on the northeastern edge, adjacent to Marco Polo Square, gave the project its original name. Further away from the city, there was a large and dense area of single-family houses, and towards the city center to the south a settlement area with simple, closely spaced rows of municipal buildings from the 1960s was located. Here, at this transition between house ownership and apartment rental, a prototypical housing estate was to be built, combining the advantages of a detached house with garden, garage, and pool with those of communal housing with affordable rents and high density. The large terraced form of the Heinz Nittel estate is unique and can easily be discerned from an airplane.It is a modular, four-part, low-lying shape that opens up with terraces from west to east for over one kilometer, meandering to the south. In wave-like form of its plan follows function. Criteria for the development of this particular form were: a low percentage of impervious surfaces, no surface traffic, southern orientation for as many living spaces as possible, connected open greenspaces, solving the corner problem, and cost efficiency. Thus, the urban form is the result of an optimization process. The open structure for over 4,000 residents is ecological, social, and economical in equal measure.

Only a few elements shape the external appearance of the buildings. On the north side, there are identical, generous, bay-like ribbon windows of cross wall width, and cantilevered projections of the building volumes over several stories. To the south are terraces and loggias, each equipped with a horizontal and a vertical element — a planter and a garden box, the foundation for appropriation. This is where residents are usually out and about. Whether tending to flowering shrubs, red currants, roses, hemp, or conifers; with an awning or a parasol, they transform the abstract, coolly calculated forms into a living structure that is fluctuating through use, weather, and the changing seasons. Marco-Polo-Promenade is the main pedestrian connection and interface between two districts. To the north are five underground car park ramps, leading to the two parking decks with 150 parking spaces beneath the buildings and making it possible to keep the entire surface area free of traffic. The vegetation of the carefully planned and well-maintained greenspaces, together with the greenery of the terraces, noticeably influences the microclimate.The concrete slab building structure consists of eight identical modules that are either arranged in different combinations or freestanding. These are each extended by head modules terraced to the east or west. Each basic module consists of 18 cross walls and a five-story base terraced to the south topped by a three-story extension with cross-wall-wide loggias. Above this is a 25-meter-long swimming pool on the roof with sundecks and sauna as well as around 180 apartments, accessed by two main stairwells with elevators and four secondary staircases. The northern sides have additional external insulation, clad in light beige, vertically mounted, trapezoidal sheet metal panels, while the southern sides are fully glazed. The access concept was based on the notion that it was reasonable to have residents walk up or down one story to reach their apartment. Thus, there is a continuous central corridor on the ground floor and only on every third floor above that. On the third and sixth floors, the corridor is linked to two side staircases that allow access to the apartments inserted one floor higher or lower. In order to increase the proportion of south-facing living spaces and to have a more varied range of apartments, maisonettes with five rooms were designed, with double-story units extending downwards or upwards at the northern end of the central corridor. This made it possible to have a high number of those living spaces with terraces and loggias to face south. The money saved through this efficient circulation was used for generous communal facilities, such as rooftop swimming pools, sundecks, saunas, play and hobby rooms, and for landscape design. Most of the apartments traverse the block, either as single-story flats or, to a lesser extent, as maisonettes. With a block depth of 18 meters and a cross wall axis measuring 5.8 meters, this created relatively generous living spaces of up to 100 square meters for a three-room apartment. A large living room opens up across the full width of the cross wall grid to the terrace. The kitchen has a direct entrance from the foyer, but is only partially separated from the living room by a wall panel. The foyer, sanitary rooms, and storage space with walk-in closets are located in the middle area, which has no natural light. The bedrooms have bay-like ribbon windows facing northeast or northwest so as to also have sunlight.

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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.