Piranesi Mention 2023: RIVUS VIVERE – Urban Building Block Breitenfurter Straße, Vienna, Austria

“First we take Manhattan, then we take Rovinj” could also be the title of this text. Both these quotes – one by PPAG architects, the other (almost) by Leonhard Cohen – come to mind in view of this residential building, designed by the aforementioned architects. When in an urban development manifesto is created in Breitenfurter Straße, it not only has a conceptually fresh appeal, but the cityscapes merge nostalgically into one another.

Anyone who encounters Vienna in this way will immediately recognise Tom Sievert’s Zwischenstadt (in-between city). It makes no difference that this city is densifying, looking for new perimeter blocks, becoming wildly green and smarter. You drive along the motorway-like Breitenfurter Straße, cross the districts of Liesing and Meidling, with the Wienerberg skyline in the distance, and somewhere behind it, in the Danube lowlands, lies the old town. In front of it, a heterogeneous patchwork, remnants of the suburban, small house cubes, commercial spaces, factory areas, islands in the river. More than 10,000 cars move in one direction and even more rush in the other day by day. A Viennese blend? Perhaps. Subsidised multi-storey residential construction on formerly hectare-sized urban wasteland is intended to tidy things up and bring them together.

You stop under a huge Spar supermarket with a school on top, on the way to meeting Anna Popelka. Suddenly you find yourself on a level with Harry Glück’s infamous 1970s Alterlaa residential complex, a game-changer in the metropolitan area, loved and hated at the same time. It delimits the eastern horizon, the dimensions have changed on site: enclosed space between the ennobled supermarket – it defines the building line – and “Rivus Vivere”, the reason for the journey. Anna Popelka immediately talks about this environment and the history of the “wide ford”, another name for the multifunctional superstructure, in front of the gently bustling café of her large residential building. Working together with Georg Poduschka and the team from PPAG architects, it was completed for BUWOG in February 2023 – seven years after the start of planning. And there it is, the “Urban Building Block”, between the wide road to Vienna and countless new residential buildings, monoliths that, despite all the restrictions on social housing, always manage to mark “otherness” compared to their neighbours. This project is different.

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