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Otto Neurath^§MS1.1.3h was a founder of the Settlement, Housing, and Construction Guild of Austria, an alliance of the construction workers’ union and the tenants’ union. This was a cooperative organized according to guild socialist lines. Later he became General Secretary of a successor organization, where settlement theory and design was taught by Neurath, architect Adolf Loos,^§MS2.1.1b and others.¹⁸⁰

“Dissemination of knowledge about housing and the organization and equipment of dwelling space is becoming an increasingly significant component of worker education,” said Neurath. “We are in an activist frame of mind here, because the worker administration of our city is building and decorating so much! … [W]e are convinced that the realization of the new art will fall to the proletariat.”¹⁸¹

The new public housing was a theme regularly addressed by Neurath and Marie Reidemeister in their Social and Economic Museum.^§MS1.1.3h Its displays presented their innovative pictorial statistics, photographs, plans, and models. Neurath stressed “the need to regard the building as a kind of machine … One can only judge if a machine is well-designed if one understands its inner workings, … [and if one is] able to judge the effectiveness of a design.” To make it accessible to the workers, the museum also opened at night.¹⁸²

Not that, for all their novelty and modernist rationalism, the new socialist housing machines were without historical reference. With its huge arched gateways, Karl-Marx-Hof referenced the old city walls of Vienna. Its garden courts spoke to landscaped spaces hitherto only accessible to lords and kings in their palaces, but now made possible by the small footprint of apartment blocks whose balconies looked out over the vista. These were expressions of the workers’ interests, the public spirit of socialism. If pictorial statistics, photographs, and plans spoke to socialist interests visually in two-dimensional miniature, the architecture of public housing spoke to them spatially, life-sized and in three dimensions.

This was more than “constructivism,” said Neurath, doyen of the Vienna Circle,^§MS1.1.3i which “seems satisfied to make a spectacle of rationalism rather than to strive for a deeper engagement with its principle.”¹⁸³

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¹⁷⁹ Helmut Gruber, 1991, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 39–50.

¹⁸⁰ Eve Blau, 1999, The Architecture of Red Vienna, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 97–98.

¹⁸¹ Ibid., pp. 395, 390.

¹⁸² Ibid., pp. 393–94.

¹⁸³ Ibid., p. 394.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 245–246. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

The Architecture of “Red Vienna” §AS2.3b