Viennese Settlers’ Movement
Hubergsiedlung, Vienna, Austria
Open Land
Socialisim / Co-Op
Social Housing
1918 - Present
1 Load Bearing Wall 2 Gardens
![1922-23 Plan for Heuberg Housing Estate Plan: Drawn from a plan by Adolf Loos, in Cornelis van Eesteren, architect, urbanist]()
Following the economic and political collapse of Vienna and the end of World War 1, more than 100,000 people lived in subsistence settlements on the outskirts of the city. What had begun as a spontaneous settlements of squats, make-shift shelters, and subsistence gardening evolved into an organized political movement that led directly to the public housing schemes implemented by Red Vienna. By 1934, Vienna had constructed more than 400 housing projects and rehoused a tenth of the city’s population.
Adolf Loos, as the chief architect of the municipal settlement offices, developed the “House with One Wall ‘’ system for the Heubergsiedlung, which reduced load-bearing members to the wall between housing units (1). The pragmatic plans include the long, narrow garden plots used for subsistence planting, (2) organized on the principles of Migge. Unlike other modernist housing efforts focused on standardization and mass-production, the Loos’s system was intended to be built and operated by the settlers. Or as Eve Blau writes in The Architecture of Red Vienna, “The System Loos focused… on the autonomy of the urban working-class subject, enabling the proletarian family to build its own shelter and grow its own food.”
Following the economic and political collapse of Vienna and the end of World War 1, more than 100,000 people lived in subsistence settlements on the outskirts of the city. What had begun as a spontaneous settlements of squats, make-shift shelters, and subsistence gardening evolved into an organized political movement that led directly to the public housing schemes implemented by Red Vienna. By 1934, Vienna had constructed more than 400 housing projects and rehoused a tenth of the city’s population.
Adolf Loos, as the chief architect of the municipal settlement offices, developed the “House with One Wall ‘’ system for the Heubergsiedlung, which reduced load-bearing members to the wall between housing units (1). The pragmatic plans include the long, narrow garden plots used for subsistence planting, (2) organized on the principles of Migge. Unlike other modernist housing efforts focused on standardization and mass-production, the Loos’s system was intended to be built and operated by the settlers. Or as Eve Blau writes in The Architecture of Red Vienna, “The System Loos focused… on the autonomy of the urban working-class subject, enabling the proletarian family to build its own shelter and grow its own food.”
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