ABSTRACT
Between 1924 and 1926 philosopher of science and political economist Otto Neurath and architect Josef Frank collaborated on the design and organization of a new institution in Vienna: the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum of Society and Economy). 1 The Museum was dedicated to disseminating information about worker housing and the many other social and cultural institutions that were part of Red Vienna’s radical project to reshape the capital of the new Austrian republic along socialist lines. The centerpiece of that project, the construction of 400 communal housing blocks, known as Gemeindebauten (city council buildings) in which workers’ dwellings were incorporated with a vast new infrastructure of social and cultural institutions, had been launched in September 1923. Distributed throughout the city, the new buildings would (by the time the program and Red Vienna itself came to an end in 1934) provide Vienna with both a large amount of new living spaces—64,000 units in which 200,000 people or one-tenth of the city’s population would be rehoused, as well as kindergartens, libraries, medical and dental clinics, laundries, workshops, theaters, cooperative stores, parks, sports facilities, and a wide range of other public facilities. 2 Conceived as the principal site for intense socialist activity in Red Vienna, the Gemeindebauten were the nexus of Red Vienna’s institutions and the spatial embodiment of the party’s communitarian and pedagogic ideals. They also had significant symbolic presence in the city, providing physical evidence of the political power that the newly enfranchised Viennese working class had acquired over the shape and use of space in their city. At the same time, that presence was highly contested, and although its political message was clear, the broader social and cultural purposes of the Social Democrats’ programs were not always clear to the people they were intended to serve, the party’s core constituents. That was the task of the new museum: to make the buildings’ forms and spaces, their various uses and relationships to the larger objectives, social policy, and cultural programs of Red Vienna clear and meaningful to a politically organized, but multiethnic, multilingual, and semiliterate working-class population.
