Claiming*Spaces Collective

On the 1st of December 2025 some members of the CLAIMING*SPACES Collective will present their projects.

The CLAIMING*SPACES Collective is a bottom-up group of students, graduates, teachers and researchers at TU Wien which seeks to foster intersectional_feminist perspectives in architecture and spatial planning. It was founded in 2019 on the initiative of Inge Manka to curate and organise the first CLAIMING*SPACES Conference in November 2019.

We, the collective of CLAIMING*SPACES, invite students, teachers, architects/urban planners and researchers to participate in the discourse and to design intersectional_feminist positions and tools together, to create different forms of doing architectural and spatial planning.

https://www.claimingspaces.org/manifest/

Sophie Stackmann

Sophie Stackmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Heritage Conservation and Building in Existing Fabric at TU Wien. Prior to this, she was affiliated with the Centre for Heritage Conservation Studies and Technologies (KDWT) at the University of Bamberg. From 2019 to 2021, she contributed to the research project Architecture and Planning Collectives in East Germany: Institutional Structures and Creative Processes in the Socialist Production of Architecture, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Her doctoral dissertation explored the concept of integrity and its significance in heritage discourses. Supported by a PhD scholarship from the Johannes Rau Gesellschaft, it was published in 2023.

Silent Heritage – Queerfeminist Preservation of Taboo Spaces

Link to project (in German): https://denkmalpflege.tuwien.ac.at/index.php/stummes-erbe/

Since its inception, the architectural canon has invoked the ideal of the architect as a genius creator who solves a design task through inspiration and drawing (Cuff 1991; Stratigakos 2017). Architectural history, with its classification criteria and norms, still draws on this premise today. In architectural practice, too, the achievements of individual white men continue to serve almost exclusively as role models. This narrow focus of the canon has consequences both for architects' professional self-image and for their understanding of design. With our research project, we want to address this imbalance with an approach that explores the potential of a queer-feminist building culture in architectural history and asks how anti-hegemonic historiography and knowledge production can shape architectural practice as queer-feminist care work (Haraway 1988; Ahmed 2017). We aim to develop a new set of tools that builds on existing architectural research and offers an alternative to the traditional tools of the canon (Lorde 1984; Bonnevier 2007). Our focus is on the future handling of existing architecture. In this way, we want to work on a historically sensitive understanding of design that develops a queer-feminist practice of building maintenance from theoretical canon criticism.

Christiane Irxenmayer

Christiane Irxenmayer is an architect and researcher based in Vienna. After completing her school education in interior design, she studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts. She has worked for various interior design, construction and architectural firms, most recently focusing on subsidised housing at WUP ZT GmbH and as part of a research and model project called Pilotinstrument Land at skstadtplanung&architektur. Since 2023 she is working on her dissertation focusing on gender constructions in the mass media representations of modern architecture in post-war western German women's magazines in the 1950s.

'Modern living' in the shop window of women's magazines in the 1950s: Narratives of 'private' living in the West German magazine Constanze in the context of consumer culture and gender constructions

Depictions of `modern living´ took on an increasingly prominent role in mass media culture in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s: By examining the narrative constructions of the newly established home section Wohne glücklich mit Constanze (Live happily with Contanze) in the women's magazine, I aim to reconsider the (re-)production conditions of modern architecture and the foundations of the still romanticised `economic miracle´ of West Germany´s post-war period.

Carla Schwaderer

Carla Schwaderer studied architecture at the TU Wien and Social Space-Oriented Social Work at the FH Campus Vienna. With her research focus on (gender-)inclusive planning of school buildings, she seeks solutions for how built and social space, including architecture, can reduce inequalities. As part of the project team of the FFG-funded BiB-Lab and the current project HOPE Raumlabor, she has already gained extensive experience in project management and the implementation of research projects related to social space.

Gender-Inclusive School Architecture

In her dissertation Gender-Inclusive Planning of School Buildings, Carla Schwaderer explores how school architecture can be designed and built in ways that consider all genders, avoid discrimination, and accommodate diverse needs. Her aim is to analyze school and learning spaces through a queer-feminist, intersectional, inclusive, decolonial, and user-centered lens.

Victoria Kraft and Zeno Mocanu

Victoria Kraft and Zeno Mocanu are architecture students at TU Vienna. Their work focuses on challenging existing power-capitalist structures and patriarchal norms by emphasising systemic issues and combating them through the application of queerfeminist theory on different scales. Their approach is based on participation in university politics, focus on research and the objective to maintain and engage with the existing structures. Various exhibitions and publications have already featured their work.

The Impact of the Self-Storage Phenomenon on Vienna’s Urban Fabric: Challenges and Opportunities for Vacant Ground Floor Spaces

The prevalence of vacant ground floor areas is a growing problem in Vienna and other metropolitan cities. Over the past 25 years, the self-storage trend has rapidly expanded into these unused spaces. What once existed only as large-scale facilities on the outskirts of American cities has now been imported into the densely built-up European inner-city neighbourhoods, without considering the needs of these specific urban landscapes.
Through our analysis, we established a direct connection between the rise of this new phenomenon, contemporary urbanisation, shrinking living and storage space, and an increasing demand for convenience.
Since 2018, storage rooms are no longer mandatory in new buildings in Vienna and are provided only on a voluntary basis. Attics that once offered space for personal items are converted into new flats. Yet the often overlooked, fundamental need for storage has not disappeared. As a result, many city dwellers are forced to turn to self-storage companies, which helps them navigate life changes and preserve memories tied to their belongings.
At the same time, this service is crucial for those in emergency situations, such as homeless people, who have to safeguard their possessions while seeking permanent housing. However, while self-storage companies address these necessities, they do not contribute to the urban fabric in a positive way—much like the high vacancy rates.
Ground floor areas are being repurposed through a low-price capitalistic business model to maximise profits rather than add value. Angelika Psenner refers to self-storage as an under-function of the urban parterre, as alternative uses are prohibited. These locations are reduced to rooms dedicated solely to storing possessions—spaces where people themselves are not welcomed—which goes against their historically intended role as places for social interaction. These street-level sections are dominated by excessive signage, making them appear more uninviting and less lively. The Austrian building regulations do not explicitly require the ground floor areas to function as public spaces. Furthermore, they do not restrict the amount of advertising displayed on the facades.
Through our research, we realised that self-storage has two distinct sides—from the perspective of the user, who is dependent on it, and the cityscape that is impacted as a result of this interaction. This raises the question of how we can address and rethink these spaces. Our design approach centers on acknowledging and working with existing structures by raising awareness about storage needs, its potentials and the drawbacks of self-storage facilities. We advocate for policies that limit advertising and protect the public function of the urban parterre. By reclaiming self-storages we transform them into multifunctional spaces that offer affordable units alongside shared common areas. Funded by storage demand, this model allows the residents to directly support consumption-free spaces in their neighborhoods.