Description

Renouncing community

Until the mid-1970s, the curves of productivity growth and of wages were almost identical. From that point on, they became disconnected. Productivity increased while wages stagnated. Political development since the 1980s has seen a turning away from the community and the state, from Reagan’s “trickle-down economics,” Thatcher’s “There’s no such thing as society,” Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid,” to German chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s and Joschka Fischer’s: “Ich-AG,” and Germany’s Hartz 4.

The promotion of “Ich-AGs,” quite literally “me-corporations,” i.e. the self-employed, as a strategy to encourage consumption — every single person must now have everything. Consumption as a compensation for the isolation and the emptiness outside of making money and having a career. Economic and political interests are promoted by corresponding media images. One example is the perfectly executed 1990 cult series Sex and the City, in which four attractive, “hard-working,” single young women featuring expensive hairstyles, dresses, and shoes are juxtaposed against the glittering backdrop of New York City.

As early as 1972, however, the Club of Rome’s report had clearly pointed out “the limits to growth,” a finding that was already clear 50 years ago. Architects and clients reacted to the developments mentioned above largely on a formal level. As far as housing was concerned, there was a return to a city of streets and facades. Stepped terrace housing, regarded in the 1960s as the ultimate solution to housing and urban development, a way of conserving land resources, of giving space to individual and community needs, and of efficiently creating a greener city, disappeared abruptly from urban planning and housing in the 1980s. Restoration and “critical reconstruction” became the motto of the moment. Mistrust of modernism’s promises of salvation was great. In 1985, the City of Vienna put a striking end to this with the Hundertwasserhaus, the most internationally famous municipal building besides the Karl-Marx-Hof.

The stepped terrace typology, with its variety of accesses and apartment types, may also have disappeared because its planning required more effort than designing a standard floor. Greater effort is required, something only tolerated when paired with a commonsense belief that housing is not primarily an economic undertaking, but also an ecological and social one.

New experiments in the twenty-first century

It was only in the twenty-first century that people began to ask, “Why are we no longer building stepped terrace housing?” After all, stepped terrace housing has “almost only advantages. It blends into the landscape, the terraces are similar to the gardens of detached houses, and at ground floor level you don’t stand in front of a vertical wall but in front of a greened slope. So why aren’t we building them anymore? Because the gradient would overburden the building authorities? Because there are no standard floor layouts for developers?” [1] Architects began rediscovering the potential of stepped terrace housing in the twenty-first century. Some have succeeded in convincing non-profit or private clients and political decision-makers of the advantages of the stepped terrace mode, although the scale has changed compared to the 1960s and 1970s. Large-scale complexes are still passé.

In 2004, on a joint red and green party initiative, the City of Vienna announced a competition for a stepped terrace apartment building with around 250 apartments. This was (seemingly) a signal to continue the successful stepped terrace housing projects of the 1970s. “With this project, we are responding to the wish of many Viennese to have their own terrace or garden.”[2] In the same year, 2004, a study was published which again confirmed the highest level of satisfaction with and excellent social interaction in stepped terrace housing.[3] Surprisingly, however, the jury awarded the contract to a project with balconies and loggias, but no terraces.[4]

In Vienna, the stepped terrace housing typology has been taken up again since the turn of the millennium, by architects who grew up with the concept during their student days since the 1970s, and who pursue architecture as more than just a commercial endeavor. Helmut Wimmer,[5] Walter Stelzhammer, Artec Architekten — all firms that have realized numerous high-quality social housing projects, conceptually and innovatively, and have dared to tackle the challenging task of designing stepped terrace housing with different concepts and focal points.[6] The residents of all three of the buildings presented here enjoy using a swimming pool on the roof or a communal greenspace. This is an effective strategy for building community and reducing leisure travel.

The idea of stacked single-family homes with gardens was implemented in 2005 by the architectural firm Wimmer und Partner with the Wienerberg Stepped Terrace Apartments: a cooperative housing development with 141 maisonette apartments and a swimming pool on the fourth panoramic deck. Eight stories with four, stacked, doublestory maisonettes: “Every resident has their own house, as it were, in a ‘shelf system’ — and has the possibility to individually design their immediate surroundings.”[7] The casual elegance of the 170-meter-long, bent block, which rounds out Wienerberg City in the south, awakens memories of vacations in Mediterranean climes. The architect Walter Stelzhammer was able to realize a social housing project on the outskirts of Vienna in 2012 as a stepped terrace building (plus row house complex). It is a five-story, almost 350- meter-long, curving block with terraces to the south, with balcony walkway access and various communal rooms on the northern side. The terraces, combined with loggias, are true outdoor spaces ranging from 25 to 40 square meters in size. The relatively flat terracing that results creates a large “overhang” on the north side. Similar to the Alexandra Road Estate (see p. 282 ff.), it evokes associations with the exterior of a stadium. Here, too, there is a south-facing swimming pool in the shared garden with a sauna and sundecks. Typologically, it has a profile similar to that of an extrusion press, comparable with Le Corbusier’s 1933 Durand stepped terrace project in Algeria, using terrace as an element to shape the structure.

The Tokiostrasse apartments ‘Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten’ built in the Kagran West urban development area by Artec Architekten in 2009 is completely different. Here, the stacking of various residential forms defines the very concept of the stepped terrace building. In contrast to the previous complexes, the terraces are part of a composition of cubes and empty spaces. The dense urban structure accommodates 100 dwellings, an attractive community room, a playground for small children on the fourth floor, a swimming pool with a lawn for sunbathing on the roof, and space for temporary uses on the ground floor. Generous amounts of space and light are brought into the circulation areas of the double- winged street building by a 5-meter-wide hall with arcades and bridges that create private zones for parking bicycles and baby prams, illuminated from above. This “central-corridor-plus” prototype opens the east-facing maisonette apartments and west-facing multi-story apartments through generous two-story loggias, referencing the ATBAT residential structure by Candilis Woods in Casablanca from 1952.

The number of stepped terrace buildings constructed since the turn of the millennium as social housing — a central focus of this book — is therefore still relatively small, while the desire of a broad swathe of the population for this type of housing is unmistakable. The typology is, however, projected and realized mostly in private and rather expensive projects, often also with a hybrid of uses, in Europe and Asia. The typology lends itself to the idea of a mix of uses, as seen in the most radical case in this book, the Centro di Servizi Sociali e Residenziali Olivetti in Ivrea.

In 2015, seven teams were invited to find new and innovative solutions in residential and urban development for a competition in Vienna’s Aspern Seestadt urban expansion area.[8] Two of the teams, Atelier Kempe Thill from the Netherlands and Lacaton & Vassal Architectes from France, designed “green mountain housing.” The realized project was by Helen & Hard of Norway, who had proposed a structure stepped on the narrow sides and thus with a relatively low proportion of terraces. It is one of the rare projects with mixed uses, combining student dormitories, privately financed apartments, office and commercial spaces, adult education center, restaurants, and commercial premises on the ground floor.

What Bjarke Ingels and Jakob Lange (BIG) succeeded in realizing in 2008 in Copenhagen with the Mountain Dwelling project, a combination of multi-story garages and a terraced, compact low-rise building, has so far remained on paper for the Dutch firm NL Architects. They proposed the typology of stepped terrace housing for a public cultural building, the Guian Urban Planning Museum in China or the ArtA art center in Arnhem. With their programmatic design for a stepped terrace apartment building in Amsterdam with 50 owneroccupied units, they realized a six-story extrusion profile in 2017. The central corridor on the ground floor provides access to the southfacing apartments and maisonettes on the northern side, while the first floor has southern sun exposure. The apartments on the four floors above are accessed via balcony walkways. This is a classic typology that provides all apartments with a spacious terrace.

Brandlhuber + Emde, Burlon und Muck Petzet Architekten designed and built a similar typology with their stepped terrace structure for Berlin-Wedding in 2018. It has an open-plan, hybrid profile, the circulation of which is reminiscent of Adolf Loos’s 1923 stepped terrace housing for workers. In both cases, the individual units are accessed from the outside via terraces about 6 meters deep. It is up to the residents to define the relationship between public and private. The building has pedestrian access via two cascade staircases flanking the terraces, leading all the way to the roof. Two elevators are also accessible from the covered public forecourt, making about 20 units on the upper floors (offices, studios, living, and working) barrier-free and directly accessible. The robust structure is open to different uses and has a high potential for appropriation. The experimental building uses resources and space efficiently and is progressively detailed and strives to do less.[9]

Onwards!

It is time for a renewed attempt at making architecture and urban development more democratic and more ecological. These outstanding examples of social housing, designed and built since the 1920s, show that innovation and high quality are indeed compatible with building for great numbers of people. An analysis awakens awareness for what is really possible.

The great prosperity often claimed today is contrasted by a somewhat different reality. Rental costs in Vienna, for example, have risen by 48 percent since 2008,[10] while the average annual income of salaried employees has stagnated since 1998 after adjustment for inflation, and wages of blue-collar workers have even fallen by 13 percent.[11] The current discussion about affordability brings to mind a time when the mayor of Red Vienna, Karl Seitz, described the situation in 1924 as follows: “Then came the building period of bleak tenement buildings, where every last patch of land was made usable. That was a time in which the Viennese were struggling under capitalism, with anyone in a rental apartment dreading the terrible payment deadline.” A return to the Grunderzeit era, with smart solutions? Apartments are affordable when their occupants once again earn decent wages for their work. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly necessary to decouple the housing question from market forces, as well as to communalize land.[12] Housing is a human right, not a commodity. We build worse housing today than we actually could. And it’s not a question of money. It’s as if there were a latent political view that people should not be too well off, latent fears that individual freedoms — which are strongly linked to the housing situation — make people less controllable.

“Tighten your belt,” they say. Yes! In consumption, energy, transport, and resource use as a whole. In housing, however, investment is what is needed. There must be a reform program for housing subsidies, with clear guidelines as to which measures should be stimulated, and these must reflect the ecological requirements of a Green City and the needs and wishes of those who live in it, since it is they who provide the funding for it through paying rent and taxes. The relationship between the city and nature must be rethought; otherwise the inhabitants will remain mere extras in an architectural scene.

With the individually designable private exterior spaces of stepped terrace housing, the punchline when looking at their rational construction methods, is the echo of Hundertwasser’s famous symbolic demand from his “Mouldiness Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture”: “The apartment-house tenant must have the freedom to lean out of his window and as far as his arms can reach transform the exterior of his dwelling space. And he must be allowed to take a longbrush and as far as his arms can reach paint everything pink, so that from far away, from the street, everyone can see: there lives a man who distinguishes himself from his neighbours, the pent-up livestock!”[13] So why don’t we build stepped terrace housing anymore? After all, in light of climate change, they are more relevant than ever. One of the reasons for the lapse since the 1980s is probably education. After all, Europe’s architecture schools have also adapted to the general political climate, withholding a wonderful understanding from over two generations of students: Luxury for all is possible!

From 2009 to 2019, as head of the Research Department for Building Construction and Design 2 at the TU Wien,[14] the editor has been able to question well over a thousand students on social housing in the Green City. Prototypical stepped terrace housing structures were developed at large events with over 500 participants and in several design studios. A set of rules formed the basis for the design, with two fundamental parameters for all groups: At least 20 percent of living space must be planned as open terraces and loggias, and at least six percent as gardens. In addition, based on the prototypical building sites, urban planning specifications such as orientation, access, number of stories, and building height had to be taken into account. Relevant building parameters for the user, such as the ratio of residential to non-residential use, minimum number of dwellings per access core, a minimum room height of 2.7 meters, and others, were also to be observed. The rules were strict, aimed at achieving both high living quality and economic efficiency.

The students used the stringent parameters to create imaginative interpretations, with no house quite like another. More than 300 projects with a total of over 20,000 residential units were designed in the large-scale experiment. This is a rich inventory of prototypes, ranging from stepped terrace hill houses to super-hybrids. As part of the exhibition “Luxus fur alle. Prototypen fur die grune Stadt” (Luxury for All. Prototypes for a Green City) in January 2017 at the TU Wien,[15] the project models were assembled like building blocks to create an 80-square-meter mock-up city with a variety of different spatial milieus: the Green City took shape.

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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.