BIENNALE ARCHITETTURA 2016 – NATIONAL PARTICIPATION OF AUSTRIA

The title is a reference to the Austrian-American architect, designer, author and exhibition designer Bernard Rudofsky (1905-1988) and his book “Streets for People”, which is a passionate plea for a more humane urbanity. Like Rudofsky, the Austrian-American designer Victor Papanek (1923-1998) also demanded a paradigm change from a design based on materials to a design based on relationships which, in the face of current crises, is also gaining a new architectural relevance under the rallying cry “social turn”.
Given the inspiration which the life and work of these two cosmopolitan emigrants from Austria provided for the project “Places for People”, it seems appropriate that Josef Hoffmann’s Austrian pavilion provides the setting in which we can celebrate the continuing influence of two visionary representatives of a socially-oriented and less object-centred Viennese modernist tradition.

Corresponding with the retention of Heimo Zobernig’s installation for the 2015 Art Biennale, a simple three-part display ensemble was developed which both provides a setting for the reception of the contents and acts as a place of meeting and interaction:
A concrete platform in front of the pavilion can be used by visitors in a variety of ways fully in keeping with the programmatic title while a second display inside the building presents a selection of 20 photographs in the form of posters which can be taken away. The images feature the development process of the three interventions which was documented photographically by Paul Kranzler during a period of almost five months.
A third display presents the projects. Here, one can take a free newspaper which contains comprehensive information about the entire project.

Caramel Architekten developed a system for an emergency shelter in a 1970s office building based on textile elements which could be installed within just a few weeks with the help of the shelter’s 280 residents. Just 52 basic sets, each consisting of a parasol, textile panels and cable ties succeeded in creating privacy and improving the user experience in the sober, open-plan office spaces for an outlay of just 50 euros and 50 minutes’ work per person.

As the use of 2,000 m2 of the 3,700 m2 building was originally limited to just four months, a central criterion of the intervention was that all elements could be swiftly dismounted and simply re-erected in another location. Despite such parameters, the team succeeded in offering people a minimum of domesticity and privacy with the help of simple resources and some ingenious detailing. Similar textile elements were also used to reshape existing communal and external spaces including a dining room, children’s playground and area of greenery in such a way that they have also been tangibly improved in terms of both functionality and atmosphere.

In parallel with the development within Haus Pfeiffergasse, the “Home Made” Tool Set is now also being used by the team in a further range of both professional and private situations. The resulting closed loop fulfils the original aim of the architects to build for not just one special target group but for everyone. For this reason, the instruction manual for “Home Made” is also available online.

The design team EOOS has developed a concept for the adaptation of a former training facility for custom officers of around 56,000 m2 close to the city centre. It is currently used by the police, the administrative court and two schools. Since the beginning of the year, 21,000 m2 on four floors have been occupied by a primary care facility run by two NGOs.

The facility consists of two-bed rooms with showers and washbasins which provide long-term accommodation to 600 asylum seekers but lacked the communal spaces, shared kitchens and meeting zones which EOOS is now creating and equipping with custom-designed furniture. However, the focus of the intervention is not only this furniture but also the creation of opportunities to work and to exchange in the form of an in-house communal economy for which a special transaction app has also been developed. A workshop in which this furniture is being built, a raised-bed garden and a system of shops provide the infrastructure for alternative labour and self-sufficiency.

The furniture collection extends beyond the walls of the individual refugee shelter by defining the creation of Social Furniture as a social issue that can be flexibly scaled and applied everywhere. In doing this, EOOS has transformed DIY into DIT – do-it-together.

To mark the development of the “Social Furniture” collection for Haus Erdberg, EOOS published a catalogue - modelled on Enzo Mari’s “Autoprogettazione” – which contains instructions on how to assemble 18 furniture elements from the areas of living, working and cooking. Not only can this furniture be self-built economically but it also supports the self-organisation of the residents and offers opportunities to share and exchange resources in the spirit of the communal economy.

The settings for the intervention by the next ENTERprise-architects are the fourth and fifth floors of a partly vacant 1980s office building in Vienna’s most populous district in the south of the city, together with the park surrounding the former headquarters building. In line with their interest in activating the potential of the temporary use of vacant space for creating new forms of urban life, the next ENTERprise-architects have developed economically producible infrastructures which each user can take possession of in their own individual way.

As part of their intervention in Kempelengasse, “room-in-room implants” in the internal spaces create hybrid living and working spaces which will be tested in cooperation with Caritas for the next three years in the context of an experimental residential project involving refugees and students. In addition to this, a series of targeted external interventions will open up the originally closed park-like site in order to encourage communication between residents and locals. These elements are seen as “urban building blocks” due to their ability to be used not only temporarily within existing structures but also in new buildings and, beyond this, in a wide range of other urban situations.

A magazine which appears as a supplement to the newspaper contains a photographic essay with 51 images by Paul Kranzler who accompanied the three initiatives of “Places for People” during a period of five months.