SAT - Social Housing in Satzingerweg, Floridsdorf, Vienna
SAT is a social housing estate built upon a brownfield site in Vienna's traditionally working-class district of Floridsdorf. Through the placement of two U-shaped buildings upon a complex and angled site the project creates a network of spatially interlocking green courtyards and paved patios that are entwined with the public spaces of the larger development. The powerful sculptural presence of the project’s architecture is derived from the interplay between the grey-rendered building masses and the monolithically cast, sand-blasted white-concrete surfaces of the balcony parapets and gallery claddings.
SAT- the social housing estate in Vienna’s Satzingerweg – is situated at the northern edge of the Schichtgründe Urban Development Zone. The Schichtgründe was a historically prominent industrial area that was reprogrammed in 2013 into a multi-functional residential, commercial and leisure area.
Housing with local services and amenities for 2.000 residents is being built upon the site of the former soap and margarine works, and what was earlier the manorial Villa of the proprietary Schicht family will be transformed to a culinary center for the new district. TC collaborated with s&s plus Architects and zwo PK Landscape Planning on the development of the master plan for the urban complex.
SAT consists of two U-shaped housing tracts. The U’s are rotated in respect to each other, which allows the buildings to be slotted into a geometrically complex site that forms an edge between the new development and a heavily wooded green-belt to the north.
The resulting composition generates a network of green courtyards and patios, each of which provide the buildings with a specific sense of place while producing a finely graded set of connections to the larger public spaces of the Urban Development Zone.
The form of the buildings is intimately related to their programmatic content. The estate contains two types of housing. 1/3 of all units are SMART apartments, which are a city program for small and exceptionally affordable flats. The remaining 2/3 are standard types of subsidized social housing in Vienna.
Each building is composed out of two compact atrium blocks of standard apartments that are connected by a bent, single-loaded line of SMART units. The dialog between the skylighted atriums and the open galleries is a central spatial theme in the project.
The main volume of the building is covered with a light grey stucco; incisions cut into this volume are rendered in a clear white stucco. The rendered volumes are complemented by the monolithic forms of the individual balconies and the fine-grained, open cladding of the galleries.
Both of these features are constructed out of precast, white concrete elements that have been lightly sandblasted into a softly tactile surface, yet their differing formal treatment generates a strong sculptural contrast.
The insistent, ostinato rhythms of the balconies provide a compositional counterpoint to the dancing, style brisé pattern of the galleries’ airily open sidings.
