Arenas Basabe Palacios and Soyka/Silber/Soyka Build 65 Homes Around Servant Cores in Vienna

Winning a competition is one thing. Turning that win into 65 occupied homes a decade later, in a foreign city, with a local co-architect and a masterplan that had to pass through years of collaborative planning, is something else entirely. Selma Am Park, completed in 2022 in the Siemensäcker neighborhood of north Vienna, is the built outcome of Arenas Basabe Palacios's "Urban Software" proposal, which won EUROPAN 12 and then evolved through a partnership with Soyka/Silber/Soyka Architekten into three residential blocks sitting on a shared underground garage in an eight-hectare neighborhood where cars are banished from ground level.

What makes the project worth studying is not its white stucco surfaces or its larch shutters, both of which are handsome but not novel. It is the organizational premise: every apartment wraps around a central "servant cabinet," a dense nucleus of storage, MEP services, and wet rooms that frees the perimeter for living space and guarantees that each home opens outward with at least two orientations. The result is a plan type that maximizes natural light hours per day while keeping corridor runs short. Three blocks, labeled S, M, and L (8, 15, and 42 units respectively), share a vocabulary of projecting bay windows, timber privacy screens, and staggered balconies, yet each block adapts its massing to the topography and the edges of the surrounding urban fabric.

Three Blocks, Three Scales

The aerial view reveals the logic immediately: three white volumes with terracotta roofs sit in staggered formation, their footprints loosely aligned but never symmetrical. The smallest block reads almost as a villa; the largest, at six stories, holds the density. Between them, pathways and planted grounds replace asphalt. The decision to split the program into three distinct masses rather than a single bar or courtyard block gives the project a grain closer to the existing low-rise neighborhoods nearby. It also creates gaps through which daylight, wind, and pedestrian routes can pass freely.

Seen from the street in winter, the buildings read as clean volumes punctuated by timber and shadow. Pollarded trees along the pathways reinforce the civic intention: this is not a gated compound but an extension of the public realm, designed with landscape architects Idealice Landschaftsplanung and planted with native species chosen for ecological resilience.

Larch as Climate Device

Local larch wood does heavy lifting across the project's skin. Vertical shutters fold over windows to block summer heat. Slatted screens provide privacy between adjacent balconies without eliminating airflow. Paneling wraps the base zones and entrance areas, giving tactile warmth at the scale where residents actually touch the building. The material is not decorative; it is a climate mediator and a social boundary, performing differently depending on whether it faces south, shields a terrace, or lines a stairwell.

Against the white stucco, the timber registers as a warm counterpoint, but its distribution is anything but uniform. On the street facade, shutters cluster where bedrooms face the road. On the courtyard side, they thin out to let the staggered balconies dominate. The rainbow captured in one photograph is accidental, but the layering of materials that it illuminates is not.

Staggered Balconies and the Courtyard Edge

The courtyard elevations are the project's most expressive faces. Bay windows project and recede differently on each floor, creating a shifting topography of white planes that catches light in a way a flat facade never could. The projections are not arbitrary; they correspond to the dual-orientation living rooms behind them, pushing the day areas outward to capture more sky. Between the bays, timber screens slot in vertically, screening balconies and terraces with enough opacity to create private outdoor rooms but enough transparency to keep the courtyard feeling open.

Climbing plants on the courtyard walls are young in the photographs but clearly intended to thicken over time. The green wall visible in one image hints at how the facades will soften as the landscape matures, blurring the line between architecture and garden. It is a slow strategy, and it requires patience, but it signals that the architects thought about the building at year ten, not just at handover.

Interior Thresholds

The stairwells deserve more attention than they usually get in housing coverage. Here, larch cladding wraps the walls and translucent polycarbonate skylights pour diffused light from above, turning what could be a fire-code afterthought into a genuine communal space. The grey tile steps are robust and unpretentious, but the warmth of the wood and the glow of the roof light make the vertical circulation feel generous rather than grudging.

At ground level, the connection between garden and interior is handled on two levels stitched together, giving ground-floor units their own small territories of planting and paving. Mature trees frame the garden paths, and the decision to exclude cars from this layer means that what you hear from these homes is birdsong and footsteps, not engines.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan confirms the deliberate asymmetry of the three blocks: they share orientation roughly but vary in setback, length, and relationship to surrounding streets. The axonometric site drawing shows how the project plugs into the wider Siemensäcker masterplan, with green roofs and courtyards mediating between the new density and the existing low-rise context. The diagram sequence is particularly revealing, tracing the massing from loose axonometric sketches through isometric clusters to the final floor plan variations that accommodate the servant-cabinet typology.

The sections cut through the courtyard reveal how the staggered balconies produce a cascade of outdoor space, each terrace stepping back to admit sun to the level below. Timber panels appear as precise notation marks in these drawings, their rhythm legible even in section. The elevation rendering, set against a turquoise sky, reads almost like a poster, but its value is analytical: it shows how the scattered timber elements break the facade into a field of textures rather than a monolithic wall. The six-story Selma L block, the densest of the three, demonstrates that the projecting bay strategy scales up without losing coherence.

Why This Project Matters

Selma Am Park is a case study in how a competition idea, in this case a strategy the architects called "Urban Software," can survive the long march from jury room to construction site without losing its organizing intelligence. The servant-cabinet plan type is a real contribution: it is compact enough to be economical, flexible enough to support a range of unit sizes across three blocks, and spatially clear enough that residents understand their homes as bright, outward-facing rooms rather than as corridors feeding off a central hallway. That Arenas Basabe Palacios, a Madrid practice, achieved this in partnership with Soyka/Silber/Soyka Architekten, a Vienna firm fluent in local codes and construction culture, speaks to the value of cross-border collaboration when both sides bring genuine expertise.

The project also makes a quiet argument about materiality and time. Larch weathers. Climbing plants grow. Native trees mature. The building in 2022 and the building in 2035 will not look the same, and the architects have designed for that difference. In a housing market that often treats facades as marketing images frozen at the moment of the press photo, Selma Am Park proposes that a residential block should age well, gaining texture and shade as its landscape catches up with its architecture. That is not a radical idea, but it is a disciplined one, and discipline is what carries a EUROPAN win through a decade of planning into a neighborhood that people actually live in.

Selma Am Park Housing, designed by Arenas Basabe Palacios (Enrique Arenas, Luis Basabe, Luis Palacios) and Soyka/Silber/Soyka Architekten. Vienna, Austria. 5,100 m² useful surface. Completed 2022. Landscape by Idealice Landschaftsplanung. Photography by Kurt Hoerbst.

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