In this book, Eve Blau looks at how ideological conflict shapedthe
buildings of Red Vienna—in terms of their program,
spatialconception, language, and use—as well as how political
meaning itselfis manifested in architecture.
In 1919 the Social
Democrat city council of Vienna initiated a radical program of
reforms designed to reshape the city's infrastructure along socialist
lines. The centerpiece and most enduring achievement of "Red"
Vienna was the construction of the Wiener Gemeindebauten, 400
communal housing blocks, distributed throughout the city, in which
workers' dwellings were incorporated with kindergartens, libraries,
medical clinics, theaters, cooperative stores, and other public
facilities. The 64,000 units housed one tenth of the city's
population. Throughout this socialist building campaign, however,
Austria was ruled by a conservative, clerical, and antisocialist
political majority. Thus the architecture of Red Vienna took shape in
the midst of highly charged, and often violent, political conflict
between left and right. In this book, Eve Blau looks at how that
ideological conflict shaped the buildings of Red Vienna—in terms of
their program, spatial conception, language, and use—as well as how
political meaning itself is manifested in architecture. She shows how
the architecture of Red Vienna constructed meaning in relation to the
ideological conflicts that defined Austrian politics in the interwar
period—how it was shaped by the conditions of its making, and how
it engaged its own codes, practices, and history to stake out a
political position in relation to those conditions. Her investigation
sheds light both on the complex relationship among political program,
architectural practice, and urban history in interwar Vienna, and on
the process by which architecture can generate a collective discourse
that includes all members of society. Published with the assistance
of the Getty Grant Program.