In cooperation with ARWAG Bauträger Gesellschaft m.b.H., whose mission is to construct buildings in a social, ecological and innovative way, the competition for the artistic design of the facade of the new building in Village im Dritten has taken place. The architects are GERNER GERNER PLUS. and heri & salli, and the artwork is scheduled for completion in spring 2025.
Village im Dritten is a new area in the third district of Vienna on the site of a former “urban wilderness” that provided an inner-city habitat for a variety of animals and plants. The theme of biodiversity and coexistence in an urban environment was taken up in the design of the facade.

The six-member jury selected the design by Barbara Kapusta on December 9, 2024.

Barbara Kapusta, „This is the space we inhabit as neighbors”

Barbara Kapusta addresses the theme of neighborhood and thus the question of how different people live together in a community. Therefore, she draws on the “figurative alphabet” she developed, consisting of 26 characters, with which she depicts the work title “This is the space we inhabit as neighbors” and forms a large-scale, abstract mural. It consists of amorphous silhouettes that condense into an ornament. The forms allow for an open reading or reception in the sense of poetry, which removes letters from the context of language in order to no longer describe, but to stand for themselves. As in a manuscript, the individual elements overlap, nestle together and correspond with each other as if they were part of a growing organism.

With her design “This is the space we inhabit as neighbors”, Barbara Kapusta explores with playful ease the boundaries of linguistics and the concept of community as a collection of different existences. The artist finds a powerful and poetic image that is perceptible on both a contentual and abstract visual level, but which reflects and stimulates the community building quality of the future neighbors. With the interplay of similar and recurring signs, it challenges people to decipher them. By translating language into an independent abstract visuality and thus detaching it from everyday reality, she opens up the possibility for different interpretations and associations. The design references the people who live here and grants them freedom of interpretation through its formal openness and lightness. It is rooted in the present and points as well beyond it, offering residents a variety of points of reference across generations.

--- jury statement

Further competition entries

Leni Hoffmann, „harah"

In her design, Leni Hofmann refers to the local proximity to the former train station Aspangbahnhof, from where people were deported during the Nazi reign of terror. Hoffmann sees the view of the sky as a connecting element between people - then and now. As an exterior plaster relief, she writes the word Himmel (sky), once in blue and once in white, in a vertical reading direction on the narrow, high facade surface. Writing is a recurring element in Hoffmann's work, which she often uses in the context of culture of remembrance. The palindrome “harah” means “sky” in the language of the Australian Aborigines. Hoffmann's lettering directs the viewer's gaze upwards into the sky and back down to the ground of Village im Dritten.

Albert Weis, „para"

In his design, Albert Weis works with the vertical section of a depiction of the sky. He extracted it from a Baroque copperplate engraving of a panorama of Vienna, including the right-hand edge of the banderole depicted on it. According to the artist, there was a lot of building activity in Vienna in the High Baroque period, including gardens and parks: the area around today's Village im Dritten was probably also built on at this time. Weis transfers the highly enlarged section to the facade surface. The enlargement into a multitude of pixels creates the association of a tile mosaic. For Weis, the transformation through the reproduction process is a symbol of the transformation process that is taking place in the new district. “para” denotes the ‘arc’ that Weis visually spans from the Baroque period to the present.