Stadtarbeit 2025 – Archives for the future!
VIENNA DESIGN WEEK launched an open call with the support of Erste Bank, inviting people to submit ideas, concepts and projects that view the city as a living archive. Using the medium of design, the format encourages the preservation of knowledge, memories and narratives and makes them accessible to everyone.
The three selected projects invite visitors during walks, workshops and other freely accessible events in and around this year's festival headquarters, the old Vienna University of Economics and Business, the Startgalerie musa and many other locations in public spaces, to document the special features of Vienna with the help of city wood, sound and stamps and to jointly create archives of the future during VIENNA DESIGN WEEK.
The three projects selected by a jury together form the eleventh edition of Stadtarbeit. With an implementation budget, the format enables the projects to be realised within the context of VIENNA DESIGN WEEK. The selected projects will also be awarded the Erste Bank Social Design Prize during the festival.
Award ceremony for the Erste Bank Social Design Prize 2025: Thursday, 2 October, 5–7.30 p.m.
With the Stadtarbeit format, VIENNA DESIGN WEEK, supported by the Erste Bank sponsorship programme – Vermehrt Schönes! – and in cooperation with Caritas Vienna, has created a framework for the implementation of social design ideas that is also internationally established.
ARCHIVE OF APPROPRIATION
Kollektiv Raumstation
The ARCHIVE OF APPROPRIATION focuses on the practices of appropriation, repurposing, misappropriation, care and repair by the current users of the old Vienna University of Economics and Business in Vienna. Since the university moved out in 2013, the site has served as a welcome alternative location and is now set to be demolished just 43 years after its construction. The lively landscape of art, culture, education, and social activities reveals the unexpected potential of the area and shows how even difficult spaces can be put to good use. The ARCHIVE OF APPROPRIATION documents these practices of repurposing and will continue to grow in a participatory manner during VIENNA DESIGN WEEK in the form of workshops.
The physical archive – a hut in front of the main entrance – can be visited at any time, as can the video and sound interventions by Evamaria Müller and Daniel Kalkhofer inside. The sound walk starts at the porter's lodge in the entrance area: by scanning a QR code and using their own headphones, visitors can explore the old university from here along a predetermined path.
STADTSTEMPEL
studio pari-pari
The STADTSTEMPEL project invites participants to look closely and feel deeply, to leave traces and read traces: as part of its field research, studio pari-pari takes relief-like structures in Vienna's urban space using modelling clay and then prints them in black ink on archive cards. This creates a growing archive of forms which, supplemented by free graphic and textual compositions by designers Marina Kampka and Lena Schrieb, is exhibited in the musa Startgalerie and offers space for exchange and discussion with the duo on several dates. Posters, postcards and a T-shirt edition of the project are available in the musa shop.
Open workshops will take place on several dates at the old Vienna University of Economics and Business (in collaboration with the Stadtarbeit project by Kollektiv Raumstation), around the neunerhaus (in collaboration with Caritas Vienna) and at the festival headquarters of VIENNA DESIGN WEEK.
Parts of the Offenbach mould archive will also be on display at the festival headquarters in the exhibition of World Design Capital 2026 Frankfurt RheinMain, this year's GAST of VIENNA DESIGN WEEK.
THE CITY WOOD ARCHIVE – STORIES FROM VIENNA'S TREES
Verein Stadtholz
Material: urban wood. After diseased city trees are felled, a pile of tree trunks and branches usually remains. In Vienna, this seemingly worthless material currently ends up mostly in compost. However, urban wood is a public resource and can be used as a local material. Together with festival visitors, Verein Stadtholz collects and processes such urban wood at VIENNA DESIGN WEEK and analyses its origin, properties and potential. During the festival, a growing archive of different elements and everyday objects is created in this way, which aims to sensitise the Viennese population to the use of this underrepresented resource and encourage them to jointly develop new ideas for concrete applications.