Kuku23 is a completed residential, learning and creative quarter in Vienna-Liesing, located on the site of the former Atzgersdorf coffin factory. In the neighbourhood of the Atzgersdorf educational campus and “Fabrik 1230”, the project combines subsidised housing with studios, workshops, cultural facilities, and a dance and music school. The task was to understand housing not as a closed-off use, but as part of an open quarter for creatives, children, young people, the self-employed and the neighbourhood.

Together with Dietrich | Untertrifaller, we structured the quarter into distinct buildings: studio houses with flexible living and working spaces, a workshop house for affordable working and living under one roof, and two twin buildings with open ground-floor zones, children’s playrooms and communal roof gardens. 

Glazed circulation seams, balconies, loggias and roof terraces open up the building volumes and bring light into the dense ensemble. Different apartment typologies allow for diverse ways of living; workshops, studios and communal spaces animate the quarter beyond everyday residential life. Kuku23 is thus a built cultural city within the city: socially mixed, spatially open and, in the best sense, open to appropriation. The guiding theme “Together rather than against one another” is not simply asserted here, but made spatially tangible in the everyday life of the quarter.