ARCH+ Wien / Roma. Agency for Better Living

The Austrian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale focuses on housing. Curators
Michael Obrist, Sabine Pollak, and Lorenzo Romito contrast the top-down model of social housing
construction in Vienna with the bottom-up model of self-organization in Rome’s civil society. What
can a system organized at state or municipal level learn from an approach based on informal
activism, and vice versa? Could a synthesis of the two models perhaps be a starting point for
overcoming the acute lack of affordable housing in our cities? And what does good housing and
a better life involve today anyway? In the accompanying issue of ARCH+, the developments in
Vienna and Rome are discussed in essays, discussion formats, and numerous infographics.
Appearing in English and German, the issue is being developed in collaboration with Michael
Obrist, Sabine Pollak, and Lorenzo Romito, the curators of the Austrian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice
Architecture Biennale. The issue is presented, together with Wien: Das Ende des Wohnbaus (als
Typologie), ARCH+ 244 (2021), as an accompaniment to the exhibition.