Arriving in Vienna on the third and final leg of the Australian Institute of Architects’ 2026 Dulux Study Tour, the tour group was eager to explore the sheer breadth and diversity of architect-designed apartment buildings that have endowed the city with its well-reputed housing culture. Home to pioneering social housing projects dating back more than 100 years, Vienna continues to proliferate innovative and affordable multi-residential models that rate the city exceptionally liveable according to the Global Liveability Index. As the tour winners dug deeper into what makes the city’s housing so successful, two things came to light: a prioritised coexistence between human life and the natural world, and an effort to nurture a strong sense of housing accessibility, security and longevity through financial and architectural models.
In Vienna, nature and nurture come together in a single, cohesive approach, which acts as the underlying principle for all decision-making. It begins with government policy – as tour recipient Sharaan Muruvan observed, “a long-standing system … in which municipal and [government-]subsidised co-operative housing form a significant part of the city’s residential fabric.” Approximately 220,000 of Vienna’s one million apartments are owned and maintained by the municipality, and a further 200,000 are government-subsidised affordable apartments – with capped rent and a generous eligibility threshold – developed and managed by a mix of for-profit and not-for-profit organisations. Muruvan reflected, “The broader intent is clear: housing is understood as part of the public good.”
Tour winner Jasmine Placentino agreed. “In Vienna, more than a century of investment in social housing has created an urban environment that feels highly liveable,” she said. “It is a city of generosity. Affordable housing is treated as a basic necessity, as is the need for shared amenity, productive gardens and play spaces that enable city living for families and communities.”
A cycling tour from the city centre right out to its extremities uncovered a vast variety of housing projects where this approach to fostering urban nature and community was evident. As tour recipient Ksenia Totoeva observed, “By the curious twist of urban regeneration, [the cycling tour experienced] the city’s architectural evolution in reverse – newer redevelopment projects near the centre; older, experimental public housing from the socialist Red Vienna period (1918–1934) out toward the periphery. Good design was everywhere: thoughtful ground planes, sensitive massing, functional apartment layouts, integrated landscaping.”
In Vienna’s south-west, the tour visited Alt Erlaa, a radical and monumental affordable housing development designed by Austrian architects Harry Glück, Franz Requat, Thomas Reinthaller and Kurt Hlaweniczka (completed 1986) on a 24-hectare site, with around 9,000 residents accommodated in 3,200 apartments. A true vertical village, the project features several tower blocks along three parallel axes, with large green and community spaces and services – including a shopping centre, school, kindergarten, sports hall, swimming pools and a church – located in between the towers, within the podium and on the rooftops. Tour guide Felicitas Konečny explained to the group that the complex has the highest resident satisfaction of any housing project in Vienna, with many of the development’s first generation of children residents now on waiting lists to come back to live at Alt Erlaa as adults. Much of this is owed to the strategic positioning of open-use community facilities in the centre of the floorplate, giving space for more than 30 clubs to operate at only the cost of electricity and services. “The positive thing about this is that neighbours become friends,” Konečny commented. Muruvan reflected that “the project’s terraced form, planted balconies, rooftop pools, shared facilities and everyday services challenge the assumption that high-density housing must come at the expense of generosity.” In addition, tour recipient Callum Senjov observed how the apartment designs prioritised freedom of lifestyle rather than size floor area, being “not [about] many rooms I want … [or] how much stuff do I need to fit into my apartment, [but instead about] how do I want to live my life in my apartment.”
Another of Glück’s more recent projects, Biotope City (with Rüdiger Lainer and Partner, 2021), also demonstrated these same principles of nature and nurture within a 5.4-hectare, 980-apartment housing development on the site of a former Coca-Cola factory adjacent to the Wienerberg recreational area in Vienna’s 10th district. Deriving its title from the idea of an “urban biotope,” the project embeds the principles of German-Dutch urban planner Helga Fassbinder, advocating the densely populated city as a form of nature and positing that, as a consequence of climate change, contemporary urban environments must adopt the ability of self-regeneration that is inherent to nature. In all, the Biotope City complex encompasses 600 square metres of community gardens, 2,000 square metres of playgrounds, 2,200 square metres of facade greenery, 3,850 square metres of ground-floor gardens, 8,900 square metres of meadows and 13,600 square metres of green roofs. As Muruvan observed, the project’s landscape is designed as vital “infrastructure, mediating climate and fostering biodiversity and daily life.”
While likewise evidence of a model of nature and nurture, the iconic Hundertwasserhaus (1985) by artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser and architect Joseph Krawina in Vienna’s city centre provided a contrasting architectural approach to urban living. The building’s aim – that “human beings and nature live together with equal rights,” according to its plaque – is manifested in the earth- and grass-covered roof, the large trees growing from within the rooms (their limbs extending from windows) and a mosaic-adorned exterior resulting from the right of every tenant to embellish the facade around their apartment’s windows. As Totoeva observed, this “idea of creating individuality … [served as an] idea of a house that you could decorate.”
For the 2026 Dulux Study Tour cohort, Vienna offered more than a catalogue of exemplary residential projects; instead, it presented a fundamentally different way of thinking about housing as a product of nature and nurture. Treated as essential infrastructure, nature is understood as a long-term investment in environmental resilience and social cohesion, while nurture, embedded through government policy on housing affordability and security, as well as through spatial design, ensures continuity of care and longevity of community across generations. The consistency of the Viennese approach – across decades, typologies and authors – points to the power of sustained policy, design rigour and a shared cultural commitment to equity, with nature and nurture working in harmony to reinforce the social, environmental and economic resilience of the city.
Lucia Amies is travelling with the 2026 Australian Institute of Architects Dulux Study Tour. Follow #2026DuluxStudyTour on social media and the blog.
Source: Architecture - architectureau
