ABSTRACT
The structure and provisions of the Austrian Welfare State were shaped under extraordinary circumstances in the context of a radical programme of municipal socialism known as ‘Red Vienna’ in the period between 1919-1934.1 The urban and sociospatial focus of that programme – and the role assigned to architecture and urban design in realizing it – remained a reference, challenge, and standard against which the postwar Austrian social welfare programme was measured and, especially in the decades following the Second World War, found wanting. Red Vienna was not only the measure but also the model for postwar Austrian social welfare, a model that had to be rescaled to the postwar political and economic conditions of the Second Republic through a process described by officials as ‘Austrification’. In the immediate postwar decades Austrification involved abandonment of the vital connection between social programme and urban architectural form that had been forged in interwar Vienna. That connection was only re-established in the 1970s by a generation of architects educated after the war whose anti-functionalist polemics, ‘architectural actions’, and calls for a return to ‘urbanity’ in the late 1960s inaugurated a new episode of typological innovation and urban engagement in Austrian housing design, and led ultimately to the (at least partial) rediscovery of the architectural instrumentality and urban spatial politics of Red Vienna.
