The complex, designed by Gerner Gerner Plus and AllesWirdGut, extends the facade of the apartments with an additional module featuring a window, and transforms balconies into outdoor rooms using planters and climate protection elements. The ground floor houses a variety of public uses, including a daycare center, an adult education center, shops, and community spaces, while the accessible rooftops function as productive gardens complemented by shared service areas.
The project employs a hybrid system that combines a main reinforced concrete structure with non-load-bearing timber-framed exterior walls and an exterior structure of prefabricated wooden columns, beams, and balconies. Furthermore, the concrete slabs incorporate thermal activation systems for heating and cooling, while the photovoltaic pergolas and green roofs reinforce the project's commitment to resource efficiency and the principles of the circular economy.
ATT - Red Emma by Gerner Gerner Plus + AllesWirdGut. Photograph by Tschinkersten.
Project description by Gerner Gerner Plus y AllesWirdGut
The Red Emma (Rote Emma) is a variety of potato. Inspired by its red-skinned namesake, which used to be grown on these grounds, the concept of the residential quarter in Vienna’s 22nd district puts the focus on regional and social rootedness. Creating practical everyday residential quality, the project, realized as a movable quarter, is informed by three core ideas: First, the design provides for residential units to be allocated an extended stretch of façade with an extra window, which, inside, translates into the possibility of partitioning off a flexible-use extra room. Second, the balconies in the Red Emma estate were built into fully functional green open-air spaces which, with windbreaks and planter troughs, are an ideal outdoor extension of the own four walls. Third, spaces with a varied mix of cultural, social and commercial offerings were created at the ground-floor level, which importantly contribute to urban community life. Aside from public institutions such as the local adult-education center with an additional event venue, a kindergarten, or a flower and a grocery store, the plinth area with a uniform ceiling height of four meters also comprises spaces for communal use with washing facilities and access to open spaces. Moreover, each building's upper floors accommodate stroller storage rooms as well as separately rentable coworking spaces. The buildings have freely accessible rooftop gardens, which take their cue in typology and use from local agriculture and whose greenery compensates for the built-up footprint of the development. Pergolas fitted with photovoltaic panels offer retreats shielded from the weather and spaces for urban gardening: The produce harvested here can be sold socially sustainably on the ground floor. The buildings have been erected as hybrid constructions with wooden exterior walls, which significantly contributes to resource efficiency and circular economy principles. So that is what she is like, the Red Emma: environmentally sensitive, close to nature, grounded.
Red Emma takes its very name from the respect of what was there before it. An ensemble of timber-hybrid housing buildings with a strong commitment to not just ecological but also social sustainability.
Continuing Development Amid Changing Conditions
In nature, resilience always comes where adaptation is accepted as part of a process. In line with this idea, the Red Emma project also faced multiple changes of circumstances, which led to careful recalibration between conceptual aspirations, regulatory requirements, and cost realities. The planning phase started during the COVID-19 pandemic, which entailed lengthy
digital coordination and limited interaction with public authorities. This was followed by an unusually protracted approval process that focused not only on fire safety regulations but also on continuing project fine-tuning to comply with a new building code and amended housing subsidy rules—all this with construction costs significantly on the rise and subsidies remaining capped.
Hybrid Timber Construction as a Strategic Decision
Being one of Europe’s largest hybrid timber projects, the Red Emma evidences how the integration of a clear basic typology with prefab timber-construction elements and an integrated construction process sets new standards of efficiency and quality. The lean-to timber shelf of columns, joists, and balcony decking not only clads the underlying system of solid base, reinforced concrete skeleton, and non-load-bearing timber-frame exterior walls in a contemporary materials aesthetic. The high degree of prefabrication also enabled an integrated construction logic in which timber and solid-structure elements were assembled in parallel, with new planning and coordination processes resulting in high-precision execution, short construction times, and reduced impact on the surrounding area. In addition, the reinforced concrete ceiling slabs were activated for heating and cooling, bringing structural and energy-related functions together in a single system.
User Participation as a Planning Tool
In line with the cultural and social objective of this urban quarter development as specified in the competition brief, the plinth zone was defined with significant participative input from users and articulated, for the most part, in accordance with those plans. A vibrant mix of uses along the street spaces and the park promenade connects community, business, and neighborhood. In the Emmalie building, the LOK association—which also has its office there, aside from some small residential units—also curates the rooftop greenhouses and operates the retail space on the ground floor. Under this social project, people with mental health issues find employment here in areas such as young plant cultivation—selling downstairs what grows upstairs. Adding to the social housing element is the ro*sa residential project for women, which, through its focus on self-directed agency, contributes to the quarter’s distinct feminist and community-oriented character. What, finally, make the offerings of this hub of urban community life complete are the Neighborhood Services Center and the Donaustadt Adult Education Center on the ground floor.
Design Concept
The design of the Red Emma follows a consistent concept that views exterior and interior spaces as corresponding systems of inclusive communities. All five buildings of the ensemble stand on a unifying red base, while individually detailed facades of wood and stucco, pergola-like roof edges, varying window divisions, and color nuances create a visual impression deliberately oscillating between uniformity and difference. On the inside, calm and durable materials create an atmosphere of grounded elegance with subtly variations from building to building, which also include the wayfinding system: distinctive lettering, finely tuned color palettes, and realistic pictograms act as a design bracket that relates the “cousin” buildings of the ensemble to one another. Like the names of the buildings themselves—Emmalie, Viola, Annabelle, Marabel, and Rosa—the visuals focus on acting humans rather than abstract symbols, on lively situations rather than sober functions.
Art Project “Young Hands for New Walls”
In the participative project “Young Hands for New Walls,” the hallways from foyer to apartment door turn into a gallery. Picture worlds developed collaboratively with residents add an identity-building visual quality to functional circulation areas, addressing themes such as community, women’s housing, nonhospitalized life, and identity. Beyond those works made in collaboration with a nearby school with an art focus and supportive artists, large murals are created in the so-called Red Salon, a generous flexibly usable community space. Finally, Individual motifs from the project are taken up as circle-shaped interventions in the foyers, consolidating the whole of the building into a coherent visual space.
