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The distinctive blocks of flats built by the City of Vienna between 1919-34 have long held the attention of those who believe that architecture has a role to play in making a better society. Building these 64,000 dwellings in fifteen short and troubled years was a prodigious achievement. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the socialists took control of a city that was no longer the capital of an empire but simply the largest concentration of population in a small and generally impoverished country with a predominantly rural economy. Beset on every side by the hostility of a conservative, clerical anti-socialist countryside where the understanding of social problems like poverty, unemployment and poor housing appeared to have advanced little further than that of Mozart’s Count Almaviva, the city was nevertheless able to build flats and facilities that transformed the living conditions of thousands of working class families.

The individual flats may have been small but they offered quality unrivalled anywhere in the city. And to complement the well-made austerity of the individual dwelling, the socialist authorities provided collective facilities in abundance, from co-operative stores to medical and dental clinics.

Architects like Gessner, Schmid, Aichinger and Ehn, the majority trained in Otto Wagner’s school, established a new typology for working class tenements designed around generous courts which came to exemplify the practical benefits of socialism. The courts with their areas of garden and green, tended every bit as proudly by a socialist municipality as the gardens of the former monarchy at Schoenbrunn, blurred the old distinction between public and private space to give a very different texture from the squalid high density housing of the city’s traditional working class areas.

Eve Blau’s account, well-researched, clearly written and generously illustrated, brings this extraordinary achievement to life. Above all, she shows how these buildings came to stand for Red Vienna’s larger achievement: building the working class culture promised by socialism. Her study enables us to understand why the Nazis were as keen to destroy it as housing reformers were keen to see it realized elsewhere. Now, as the role of architecture in shaping a better society again attracts interest, the example of Vienna needs to be more widely known and better understood. Eve Blau’s handsome book makes this possible.

NICHOLAS BULLOCK