This mid-rise block of flats looked like a fortress years before it actually became a besieged holdout against the fascists in the brief Austrian civil war of 1934

Vienna’s Karl Marx Hof (roughly, “Karl Marx Court”) is a rare example of architecture both as political instrument and ideological symbol – a building people would fight for, and against, with guns.

Started by the municipality of Vienna in 1927 and finished three years later, it became one of the main battlefields of the brief Austrian civil war of 1934. Its bombardment, like its construction, became a symbol – this time not of municipal socialism but of Fascism, and of the first serious resistance to it.

None of this meaning, however, would have been imparted to Karl Marx Hof were it not for the fact that the building already looked like a fortress, a bulwark, a castle of solidarity, years before it actually became a besieged holdout. An incredibly long, red, mid-rise block of flats punctuated by archways just north of the city centre, it encloses schools, baths, a library and a health centre. It culminates in a grand square with sculptures, spikes, turrets and the prominent legend, in beautifully cast letters: “Karl Marx Hof, built by the Vienna City Council.”

Simply, this is the sort of building that you could imagine people being willing to lay down their lives for. Yet its architect, Karl Ehn, was not an active socialist. He carried on working on commissions after the Fascist coup of 1934, and even worked for the Nazis after the annexation of Austria four years later.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The building looks like a bulwark, a castle of solidarity. Photograph: Andrew Jankunas/Alamy

For all the aplomb of the design, it came from the brief, not the designer’s political or even architectural inclinations. Instead, it came from the intersection of the city of Vienna’s needs for high-density inner-city housing, and the sort of architectural ideas that were dominant in the capital of the Hapsburg Empire in the early 20th century.

Ehn was a student of Otto Wagner, a modernising imperial architect who pioneered a rationalistic, stripped-down approach that, while undoubtedly an influence on modernist architecture, stopped short of the refusal of ornament favoured by younger Viennese architects and thinkers such as Adolf Loos or Otto Neurath.

Wagner’s finest building, the Postal Savings Bank in Vienna, encapsulates this tension – with its steel-and-glass banking hall and steel frame, it is modernist; with its symmetry, heroic sculpture and stone cladding, it is neoclassical. Wagner’s students carried on this style of architecture into the 1920s and 1930s, in contrast to architects in Berlin or Frankfurt who explored wholly new conceptions of architectural space at the time.

The Wagner school’s liking for monumentality and traditional city grids was serendipitous for Vienna’s city council. Like most European capitals after the first world war, Vienna faced an enormous housing crisis, with overcrowding, high rents and mass unemployment. Unlike almost all other capitals, though, the city government – overwhelmingly dominated by “Austro-Marxists”, well to the left of most Social Democrats – didn’t respond with suburbanisation, but with a rebuilding of the inner city.

The city government considered the decentralising ideas of architectural radicals to be both expensive and detrimental to the interests of Viennese workers. Instead, they wanted to keep them in workplaces in high-density, in tight-knit communities, only with far higher standards than they had before.

As a result the city embarked on an enormous building programme – putting up 64,000 flats in less than 10 years, housing around a quarter of a million people – funded by heavy taxation of the wealthy and, particularly, of landlords, who were of course thoroughly dispossessed by the programme, and who later became Vienna’s main supporters of Austrian Fascism.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The archways lead to open green spaces, full of social buildings, trees and playgrounds. Photograph: Ian Patrick/Alamy

With the municipality building in the inner city, the architects of “Red Vienna” were perfectly placed to give that an appropriate face – proud, monumental, a little bit melodramatic. Each of the dozens of Hofe (courts) dotted around the Vienna inner ring road follows the historical street line, refusing to break with the traditional layouts as they meet the pedestrian.

But the difference is inside. Their grand archways lead not, as in 19th century housing, to progressively more dingy and squalid sub-apartments around gloomy courtyards, but to open, park-like spaces, full of social buildings, trees and playgrounds. The decorative details like sculptures, murals, majolica tiles, were added as a way of keeping craftsmen in work during a period of widespread unemployment.

Rather than the total rejection of the 19th century that was becoming the norm in Berlin, Rotterdam, Paris or Moscow, this was an adaptation of the pomp, centralisation and street-centred planning of the imperial city to very different political ends. Here, the pomp and centralisation were a means to celebrate not the emperor, but the proletariat.

These buildings shouted from the rooftops that the Viennese workers and their elected representatives were transforming the city in our own interests – and they did so in places where they couldn’t be avoided.



Outside Vienna, the anti-semitic, nationalistic Christian Social Party dominated Austria, and considered these buildings to be literally fortresses of a hostile, alien, urban movement; their allegation that they were built for military purposes was tested when, in February 1934, a constitutional crisis led to right-wing paramilitaries and the army being sent to Karl Marx Hof, Engelshof, Bebelhof, George Washington Hof and the others to suppress the city.

The city fought back, but it was poorly armed and ill-prepared. Karl Marx Hof itself was heavily shelled. Hundreds were killed in the brief conflict.

After the Anschluss and after the war, the city of Vienna would build again, and the city still has the most extensive – and arguably the finest – social housing programme of any capital city in Europe. So, in a sense, they won in the end.

