Vienna, Austria

Oliver Gerner’s Red Emma building combines residential living with green spaces, enhancing urban biodiversity, and providing residents with opportunities for urban farming that not only contributes to environmental sustainability but also strengthens community bonds among residents.

The Red Emma is a potato cultivar.

Inspired by its red-skinned namesake, which used to be cultivated on these grounds, the concept of the residential quarter situated in the 22nd district of Vienna places the focus on regional and social rootedness.

For this project, Oliver Gerner was awarded with a Europe 40Under40 Architecture and Design Award by by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies , which acknowledges the talent of architects under the age of 40 across Europe.

In creating gender-sensitive and everyday-usable-residential quality, the project, planned as an accommodable quarter, is informed by three core ideas: First, the design provides for a reduced building depth, so that the more stretched-out, yet compact residential units each get a larger façade, which, on the inside, translates into the possibility of partitioning off a flexible-use extra room.

Second, the balconies in the Red Emma estate are built into fully functional green open-air spaces which, with windbreak panels and planter troughs, are an ideal outdoor extension of the four walls.

Third, barrier-free accessible areas will be created on the ground-floor level, which, with a mix of cultural, social, and commercial offers, importantly contributes to urban neighborly relations.

In addition to public institutions such as the local adult education center, a kindergarten, an event venue, or a flower and a grocery store, the plinth area with a uniform four-meter ceiling height also accommodates rooms for communal use with washing facilities and access to open spaces.

Each floor of the slender structures in hybrid-timber construction also has a multipurpose room for collective use as well as a separately rentable coworking space.

On top of the buildings, there are freely accessible roof gardens, which are informed by local agriculture in typology and use and fully compensate for the development’s built-up footprint.

Pergolas with photovoltaic modules offer weather-protected retreats and possibilities for urban gardening: what is watered with grey water here can later be sold as socially sustainable produce in the ground-floor store.

So that’s how she is, the Red Emma: environmentally sensitive, close to nature, grounded.

Project: Red Emma, wood-hybrid housing with urban farming roof landscape
Architects: GERNER GERNER PLUS. and AllesWirdGut
Lead Architects: Oliver Gerner and Julia Haranza
Client:BWSG, MIGRA
Photographer:GERNER GERNER PLUS. & AllesWirdGut