Judenburg West, Frauengasse
Judenburg, Austria
Mack Architects

Mack Architects uses prefab components to create colorfully bejeweled subsidized housing units in a small Austrian town

© Manfred Seidi/Archfoto

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By Liane Lefaivre

If you thought Mark Mack’s Southern California buildings were polychromatic because of some local Latino influence, you would be right—but only partly. Mack hails from Austria, which unlike its neighbor Switzerland, has an architecture that historically is as colorful as any in the world. Train stations, churches, castles, schools, factories, hotels, concert halls, houses, apartment buildings—you name it—all come in hues of dusty pink, mint green, burnt orange, pale sienna, baby blue, and cobalt. Even the plastic sheeting used for wrapping bales of hay in the snowy fields outside of Judenburg are an exquisitely pale turquoise.

Unlike Modernists from the 1920s and 1930s, such as Bruno Taut, Le Corbusier, Gerrit Rietveld, and Theo van Doesburg, Mack doesn’t have a highfalutin theory to go along with his choice of colors. He admits, “There is no academic backing to this. I just think everyday life is full of color and multivalent. And this, the vernacular of real people in the real world, is a quality I give to my architecture.” He applies this approach to all his projects, whether in Los Angeles or Austria.

About three hours from Vienna by train, near the center of Austria, Judenburg is a small, 13th-century hill town that boasts one colorful building after another. It happens to be Mack’s hometown. As its economy has grown, Judenburg has expanded beyond its historic core, and the area to the north has emerged as a location for low-cost social housing.

In Austria, social housing operates on a lease-to-buy system, in which the state subsidizes rents, then allows tenants to buy their apartments at low prices after 10 years. The system not only creates affordable housing, but establishes an incentive for occupants to invest in their buildings. The city of Judenburg and the state of Styria sponsored a competition that Mack won for the master plan to develop 600 units of housing and the infrastructure to support it. The client, a nonprofit housing provider, hired Mack to design Judenburg West—a 22-unit, four-story building.

For his local collaborator, Mack chose Roland Hagmüller, who was a friend from his days at the Universität der Bildende Künste in Vienna.

Carrying on the irreverent tone of the ’60s, Hagmüller describes Judenburg West as a “Big Mac” with a street-level concrete garage serving as the bottom “bun” and a lightweight zinc canopy on top. In between, a wood-framed structure contains the apartments, which range from two-to-four-bedroom units. For floors and walls, the architects used prefabricated, cloth-laminated panels made from a strong evergreen wood, a material called KHL (Kreuzlagenholtz) that was developed by a Judenburg factory. The walls themselves are sandwiches made of a layer of KHL panels on the inside, untreated larch-wood cladding on the outside, and insulation and air in between.

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Formal name of Project:
Judenburg West, Frauengasse

Location:
Judenburg, Austria

Gross square footage:
21,000 sq. ft.

Total construction cost:
$2.3 million

Owner:
Ennstal, Wohnbau Genossenschaft www.room2.at

Architect:
Mack Architects
2343 Eastern Court
Venice, CA 90291
T 310 822 0094
F 310 822 0019