Forms in relation to life / The Vienna Werkbundsiedlung

The title of Heidrun Holzfeind’s film about the Viennese Werkbund housing settlement signals from the outset its concern with the interrelationship of life and forms. Architecture invariably narrates a piece of human cultural history as mirrored in its style. In this regard, should attention be drawn to a living space, the narrative necessarily becomes personal. So it is that life not only makes demands of form, but that these very forms subsequently determine life in and with them.
In the 1920s, the Werkbund architectural association stood for a new kind of functional design, sober and unadorned, but meeting residential...