In Episode 16, Madlyn Miessgang speaks with Daniele Karasz and Niloufar Tajeri, project participants in “Labour@Home – Small Interventions for Digital Work at Home. A Socio-Scientific and Architectural Perspective.”

The project focuses on the apartment as a space of work, where the blurring of boundaries between professional and private life becomes visible. The renovation of large post-war housing complexes is pending and opens up the opportunity to address the conditions of gainful employment in the context of thermal refurbishment.

The project explores working from home as a participatory renovation strategy and poses the following question: What processes are required in large housing complexes to respond to the new challenges of digital work through small interventions in apartments, shared spaces, and open areas?

A concrete, transferable planning methodology is being developed, based on the principle of small, affordable steps in order to keep housing costs low. The project is being tested exemplarily in two post-war modernist housing complexes in Vienna. The aim is to develop concrete strategies together with Wiener Wohnen and the Association of Limited-Profit Housing Associations to integrate new forms of digital work into housing complexes through affordable interventions.

Daniele Karasz holds a PhD in social anthropology and works on issues of housing, urban development, and migration. He is an Associated Researcher at the LAA (Laboratoire Architecture Anthropologie) at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette and a researcher at the Research Unit of Sociology at the Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Planning at TU Wien. He also teaches at the Institute for Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Vienna and at FH Wien – University of Applied Sciences for Management & Communication.

Daniele Karasz has coordinated numerous research projects and has been involved in the planning and implementation of subsidized housing projects in Vienna. In addition, he has worked on the development and implementation of museum education programs with a focus on contemporary history. He is co-founder and director of Search & Shape.

Niloufar Tajeri studied architecture at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (formerly the Technical University of Karlsruhe). Since 2022, she has been a research associate in the DFG Research Training Group “Identity and Heritage” at the Technical University of Berlin, where she pursues research on questions of identity and cultural heritage. Previously, she taught in the Master’s program Coop Design Research at Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, Bauhaus Dessau (2021–2023), and in 2020 at the Berlin University of the Arts in the field of art and cultural history. From 2017 to 2022, she worked as a research associate at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture and the City at TU Braunschweig.

Before joining TU Braunschweig, she worked as an architect in Berlin and was involved in various projects. Her professional experience also includes positions as a research assistant in Rotterdam and Amsterdam and as a project assistant at the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority. She was project manager at onlab and editor at ARCH+ in Berlin.

Project participants include Daniele Karasz, Sladana Adamovic, and Mark Scherner from Search & Shape, as well as Niloufar Tajeri and Andreas Rumpfhuber. The project was funded במסגרת the “AK Wien – Digitalisierungsfonds Arbeit 4.0.” Cooperation partners were GBV, Wiener Wohnen, and ÖSW.

Photo credits: Search & Shape

Podcast information
The podcast ZUKUNFT STADT is a project of the Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Planning at TU Wien. It is produced in cooperation between future.lab and the Research Unit of Local Spatial Planning at TU Wien.

Concept and production, audio and editing: Lukas Bast, Lena Hohenkamp, Lisa-Marie Kramer, and Madlyn Miessgang
Intro music: Jakob Kotal