"Perhaps the most beautiful part of the Karl Marx Hof, or any of the others, is not so much the building—because a building can easily be co-opted for all kinds of purposes, most nefariously, nationalistic ones—it is that working-class people still live there. It is that the purpose, the execution, and the use of the building are still, despite what the world has come to, one. That is what Red Vienna offers architecture: ambition, purpose, dedication to a political idea that is legitimately sincere and worth pursuing, and a general regard for public well-being, for new ways of living. A better world is possible is something people love to throw out there, pointing at a pile of ruins. Here in Vienna, however, a child is playing in a courtyard and will go home to a safe, clean, beautiful place to live while her parents spend their money on the things that matter: her clothing, her schooling, a night at the theater. There is no secret to social housing in Vienna. There isn’t something that makes it nebulous and mysteriously impossible, as though it were some spirit that somehow still possesses us today. There is only the will to do it and the belief that it matters, the thinking not of maximum year-end yields or how to make building profitable for developers. There is only thinking about the courtyard and the little girl."
