Along the “Gastgebgasse” in Liesing, a new residential quarter with a total of 430 subsidised apartments is being built in the immediate vicinity of the Sargfabrik and the planned Bildungscampus Atzgersdorf. The southernmost district of Vienna strives for more art and culture. We have therefore developed our concept for the Kuku 23 residential quarter with the aim of providing an affordable cultural program, especially for children and young people.
Art, culture and creativity run as a common thread and interweave these supporting pillars with meaningful, small-scale, affordable developments on the cultural level with the Sargfabrik and the Bildungscampus. Neighbourhood institutions such as a music and dance school, workshops, a sewing room, a bakery as well as sports facilities of the Sportunion Wien interact sustainably with the program and event possibilities of the Sargfabrik and thus create a unique and daily artistic and cultural neighbourhood in Vienna.
In November 2019, the project won a two-stage public property development competition. wohnfonds_wien has been organising nationally and internationally recognised property development competitions for decades with the aim of making social housing affordable while maintaining quality criteria.
City within the city
The construction volumes are divided into individual “houses” that move around naturally lit joints. This enables a variety of roof landscapes, better lighting conditions and a human scale. We have developed a wide range of residential typologies: corner-illuminated, oriented on one side or inserted through the pergola. More than 50 percent of the subsidized rental apartments have been designed as SMART apartments.
The facades of the residential buildings are accentuated by a continuous loggia band. From house to house they are given their own expression through different colours and individual façade greening. Generous glazing brings light into the kitchen and entrance areas and expands optically and functionally the apartments with additional green space.
Creative and common rooms on the ground floors are connected and accessible to all, mutually stimulating each other. There are no private rooms and no fences in between. The project can continue to grow and develop through a variety of social acquisition processes in micro-rooms and micro-studios, through building art or possibilities for subsequent use.
The “Atelierhaus”
On the “forecourt” the Atelierhaus (studio building) mediates between the Sargfabrik and the school campus and leads into the open residential area via its two-storey passage. On the east-west axis, the school campus and the Sargfabrik are grouped together in the line of sight.
What is special about the Atelierhaus is that the supporting structure is broken down into individual column sections. A continuous room height of 2.80 metres and open floor plans with a horizontal shaft allow flexible planning of the units allowing multiple use. This enables the studio house to react to the processes in the Grätzel in the long term and grow with them. The Atelierhaus ensures a good, stimulating cooperation with the Sargfabrik both with special functions ( crafts on the first three floors, residential studios above) and with structural measures (controlled ventilation of the living space and noise protection).
In order to enable new life structures and synergies, the house dissolves the typical boundaries between creation and living:
o Workshops and studios (commercial): a two-storey workshop, makerspace, artists’ studios run by the Traktorfabrik, a dance school situated on the ground floor with studios on the 1st + 2nd floor, which can be rented by residents as well as by Sargfabrik if required.
o Residential studios: in the 3rd floor facing the Sargfabrik, they are preferably used for living and working. Just like the studios underneath, they only receive their sizes and room layouts in an individualised participative allocation process. A special place demands special processes!
Use the floor plan configurator to plan your individual studio in the new art and culture quarter of Vienna (Allocation of the studios from July 2020):
