ARCH+ 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.