The entire process of Wildgarten was compiled by Arenas Basabe Palacios in a fun and intelligent comic entitled "The Commons" that you can see here.
The blocks use coloured insulating ceramics on their south façade, facing the garden, which allows sunlight to reach all the rooms of the houses. Arenas Basabe Palacios have given the neighbourhood its own identity with the landscape formed by its gardens and its particular vision of the urban.
The Sunflower Houses by Arenas Basabe Palacios. Photograph by Kurt Hoerbst.
Description of project by Arenas Basabe Palacios
Following the approval of the 'Wildgarten' planning as an evolution of our Europan 10 winning project, development work began on the new 10-hectare neighbourhood at Emil-Behring-Weg (Meidling, Vienna). The owner of the land (ARE, Austrian Real Estate) commissioned the development of the building projects to multiple architectural teams, as well as to various developers, from the Viennese social housing company to different cooperatives, to promote a collaborative, more democratic and plural urbanism.
Arenas Basabe Palacios was commissioned to design and implement 11 housing blocks of different scales, comprising 82 dwellings with a total built area of 9,500 m² including communal spaces, collective bicycle parking, and ground floor retail. Within the planned urban fabric, this succession of buildings serves as a suture between urban elements of disparate character: a historic building rehabilitated as a cultural center, a group of cooperatively managed housing, and an urban square with services and local commerce.
The new neighborhood has an eminently pedestrian character and the continuity of the natural space is encouraged through the 'Allmende': a wild, low-maintenance green space with the capacity for temporary appropriation by the community of neighbors, a sign of identity of both the urban project and its architecture.
The design of the building not only respects the original urban idea but also enhances it: its organization is based around the matrix of gardens that structures the new neighbourhood. Each block is built around its garden, which supports a building that varies in height, bay, and type of construction: small-scale buildings (size S) house single-family homes and duplexes; medium-scale buildings (size M) and high-rise buildings (size L) serve as blocks of collective housing for a diverse and porous urban fabric.
The materiality of the buildings only emphasizes this idea. The Sunflower Houses ('Die Sonnenblumenhäuser') clad their south-facing facades with coloured ceramics, opening up all the daytime rooms to the garden. A characteristic construction system of load-bearing walls made of large insulating ceramic blocks ('Hochlochziegel') allows an interior design of neutral, flexible, and reconfigurable spaces.
The relationship with its built environment presents a sensitive balance of building scales, ensuring good sunlight for all interior rooms, the south-facing gardens, and the open spaces in between, creating a friendly transition with the surrounding architecture.
The result is a residential fabric that is at once unitary and diverse, with architecture that reflects the urban/natural duality of the urban planning project, thus qualifying the entrance to the new Wildgarten district.
