On occasion of the IBA (International Building Exhibition) Vienna 2022, the studio research of architecturaltheory.eu this year is dedicated to new forms of social housing.

In this context, we aim at interpreting anew what is meant with “social”, as it has become so laden with assumptions, that it is not always certain what is meant by it. The social has different meanings and is also subject to continuous change. Today, media and notably social media alter and replace the social realm. In the Anthropocene, the social cannot just be about relations among people, but should take a wider natural and material context into account, urging us to speculate on what new social housing might be.
During the studio, we’ll produce an overview of the most important concepts for and positions on social housing, as they have been developed over the last 150 years. At the same time, we will study the history of social housing in Vienna in depth, comparing it with that of other European cities. Since, strangely enough, there is no existing comparative international overview or standard work on social housing, we will also start a web archive of a collection of more and less known social housing projects, concentrating especially on their typologies and backgrounds. The archive will be used as a point of departure to produce scenarios meant to anticipate future tendencies in social housing. Part of the summer semester will also be dedicated to the preparation of an installation on the topic of the studio, to be shown in Venice during the 2018 Architecture Biennale and on the Internet. Finally, we will try to profit as much as possible from the events organised by the IBA Vienna, undertaking excursions to Vienna and Frankfurt.