Building Resistance

In 1919 the newly elected Social Democratic city council of Vienna initiated a radical program of municipal reforms designed to reshape the social and economic structure of the Austrian capital along socialist lines. The cornerstone of this program was a network of health and welfare services that were distributed throughout the city to provide “cradle-to-grave” care, counseling, and instruction in all aspects of public health and welfare. It involved the construction of 400 buildings in which housing and social institutions were distributed throughout the city. Red Vienna was a project to change society by changing the city; a project that saw architecture as playing a major role in that effort. Through a close reading of the architecture, the lecture will explore the interrelation of politics and built form, and the complex processes whereby the connection between social program and urban architectural form was forged in Red Vienna.

Eve Blau is the Director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University where she is a professor of the history and theory of urban form at the Graduate School of Design, and Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. A principal concern of her research is with the complex dynamics of urban transformation in the context of rapidly changing sociopolitical, environmental, and technological conditions. A major focus is on cities and urban regions in the post-socialist world. Her books include The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934; Baku: Oil and Urbanism; Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice; Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe; Architecture and Its Image.

Poster