Site
Fuchsröhrenstraße, 1110 Wien
Client
Gemeinnützige Bau- und Siedlungsgesellschaft MIGRA Gesellschaft m.b.H., Wien
und HEIMBAU Gemeinnützige Bau-, Wohnungs- und Siedlungsgenossenschaft, reg. Genossenschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, Wien
Start of Construction
02/2015
Completion
09/2016
Site Area
336 m²
Gross Floor Space
518 m²
Net Usable Space
419 m²
Partner in Charge
Mark Gilbert
Project Team
Christian Aulinger, Mark Gilbert
Realisation: Sonja Reisinger Brigitta Sponer, (Project Managers)
Michael Pulman, Ricardo Oliveira
Photos
© Hertha Hurnaus
©Daniel Hawelka
FUX may be small in size, but its objectives are generous and substantial. This project for supervised communal housing provides recently arrived, unaccompanied refugee minors with a place in Vienna that they can call home. By providing opportunities for shared activities as well as places for private retreat, FUX is a supportive environment that helps these young people adapt to their new city.
The building’s layout supports its unusual program and connects it with its heterogeneous context.
The house’s eight individual bedrooms are located on the second, uppermost floor of the building. A shared living room, with a kitchen and a suite for the counselor, is found on the building’s first floor. A large private balcony, cantilevered deeply over the front yard, is set in front of these common areas. The ground floor contains a community room that is shared with the adjacent public housing estate and a broad, open passage, which connects the courtyard of the estate to the public street.
FUX mediates between the differing scales and building styles of its richly contrasting surroundings: Vienna’s heteromorphic, rapidly developing XI District. The design uses precise massing and haptic, inviting materials to integrate itself harmoniously into Fuchsröhrenstraße’s existing, enticingly ramshackle row of 19th century houses and stalls.
Towards the street, the building expresses itself as a powerfully articulated and sculptural form whose various edges correspond to the fronts and heights of its neighbours. Seen from the courtyard of the adjacent housing estate, the building’s front appears as a planar surface, which is subsequently interlocked with the new-built estate’s outbuildings to create a single, integrated composition.
The facades are clad in iridescently stained, larch-wood siding; the undersides of the passage are rendered in stucco. The cladding’s tactile edges and shimmering surfaces stand in agreeable dialog with the surrounding milieu.
