The entrance archways to the Karl Marx Hof, Vienna’s most famous Gemeindebau, or municipal apartment complex.
Photographer: Richard Conway/Bloomberg CityLab
Vienna Launched a Public Housing Revolution in the 1920s
With their huge scale and shared amenities, the apartment complexes known as Gemeindebauten helped make Austria’s capital one of the world’s most livable cities.
(This article is part of Bloomberg CityLab’s series exploring the iconic home designs that shaped global cities. Read more from the series. Get the next story sent to your inbox by subscribing to the CityLab Daily newsletter.)
The housing crunch that the growing city of Vienna faced a century ago might seem strikingly familiar today: Private developers in the Austrian capital were good at building elegant luxury residences and substandard tenements for the poor, but they’d failed to create enough units to allow average residents to live in decent comfort at an affordable price.