Karl-Marx-Hof

Landmark · Döbling (19th)Vienna,Austria

A kilometre-long block of 1,382 workers' flats in Vienna, washing and childcare moved downstairs, shelled by artillery in the civil war of 1934.

The Karl-Marx-Hof is a single building over a kilometre long, and less than a fifth of its site was built on. Stand on 12.-Februar-Platz and the centre of it rises into six towers over wide arches, ochre and iron-oxide red. Vienna's Social Democratic council put it up between 1927 and 1930 to plans by Karl Ehn, a pupil of Otto Wagner. The 1,382 flats were small, about forty square metres: a living-kitchen, one room, running water, their own lavatory. None had a bathroom. You washed in one of the two bath houses and did the laundry in one of the two laundries, because the plan was to move housework downstairs, next to the kindergartens, the library and the pharmacy. In February 1934 the federal army brought artillery against the block during four days of civil war, and it gave in on the fifteenth. On 14 June 1938 the Nazis began clearing Jews out of Vienna's council flats, and the 212 Jewish residents here were given two weeks to go; a plaque names the forty-six who were murdered.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look for small pocks in the plaster as you walk along the front — When the facade was restored the bullet marks from February 1934 were deliberately left where they were, and nothing signposts them.
Come in the morning if you want the colours — The great arched front faces east across Heiligenstädter Strasse, so it takes the sun early and sits in its own shadow by mid-afternoon, when the ochre goes flat.
Do not build a day around the museum inside — It is small and opens only a couple of afternoons a week. The building itself is the reason to come, and the outside is open every day.

Things to do

1
Read the estate's programme in clay, then walk through the arch
Stand under the great arches on 12.-Februar-Platz and look up at the four ceramic figures set above them. Josef Franz Riedl made them in 1930, and they stand for Enlightenment, Liberation, Child Welfare and Physical Culture. Then go through one of the arches into the courtyard behind, where the street noise stops within a few steps among old trees, benches and prams, and Otto Hofner's bronze sower stands. Look up at the rear elevations: most of these flats were given a balcony or a loggia, which was rare in 1930.
2
Walk the length until the drama runs out
Start at the towers in the middle and follow the front north or south. The monumental part ends quickly and the block runs on for hundreds of metres as plain, low housing with shops and doorways along it. That plain stretch is what nearly everyone here actually lives in.
3
Stand in a laundry that is still a laundry
Find Waschsalon No. 2 inside the complex and go in on one of the two half-days a week it opens. The ground floor still washes clothes for the block, and the exhibition on Red Vienna sits directly above it. Standing between the two is the clearest way to understand what a shared laundry was for in a building whose flats had no bathrooms.