Social Housing

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to present Social Housing: Vienna—Los Angeles. The exhibition brings together case studies from both cities to examine the relationship between architecture, housing policy, and civic responsibility.

Social Housing: Vienna—Los Angeles unfolds at the Schindler House, designed in 1922 by Austrian émigré architect R.M. Schindler as an experiment in cooperative living. Its construction coincided with the emergence of Red Vienna, when the city began developing the municipally supported housing system that would transform Vienna over the following century. These parallel experiments in collective life provide a historical frame for considering the sharply different trajectories the two cities have followed: Vienna’s sustained public investment in housing alongside the largely market-driven conditions that have shaped Los Angeles.

Rather than proposing Vienna as a model to be directly replicated, Social Housing: Vienna—Los Angeles asks what these distinct histories can reveal about the possibilities for housing today, and how architecture, public institutions, and collective action might contribute to new forms of affordable and shared urban life.

Opening: October 22, 2026, 7 p.m.