Viennese Settlers’ Movement


Hubergsiedlung, Vienna, Austria
Open Land
Socialisim / Co-Op
Social Housing
1918 - Present


1 Load Bearing Wall 2 Gardens

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.”



Nam semper semper ex
In porttitor pellentesque sapien





Annie Schneider

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Communes in the New World

The question of how to live together—of how best to live together—is the foundation of any society. The last few years have exposed the fault lines in our current system: climatic catastrophe, economic crisis, supply chain collapse, civil unrest, rampant inequality, and a global pandemic. We live in congested cities and in potentially dangerous proximity, yet remain isolated. In light of these mounting pressures, it’s time to revisit the fundamentals. How to Live Together offers alternative ways of being, thinking, dwelling, and living. It calls into question every basic assumption and prevailing social norm: belief, sex, the nuclear family, property ownership, our relationship to land, production, and consumption. It is both a critique and a roadmap.