Innovative Architectures with a Social Impact: magdas Caritas Hotel by AllesWirdGut |

Architects and designers often wonder in which ways they can improve the life of ordinary people and it's not rare to see lectures and debates about this question that doesn't seem to have a simple answer.

Yet Caritas Vienna and AllesWirdGut Architects have developed a new concept that attempts to provide not one definite answer, but a solution to certain modern issues. Together they developed a new type of social business, a house for tourists visiting Vienna and for refugees, all under one roof.

Initiated by magdas, the social business subsidiary of Caritas Austria, this project consists in a hotel operated to professional standards, located in Vienna's Prater district.

The hotel has 78 new and elegant rooms available to city travellers, tourists in Vienna and overnight trippers, each with a view of the Prater park landscape.

Living side by side with the hotel guests, there are also young people, refugees who were left no choice by hunger, war, persecution, and torture in their home countries. For them, the hotel is a temporary place to stay, and for some, it is also a workplace.

The hotel – completed in February – occupies a largely preserved and refurbished existing building (a previous retirement home dating back to the 1960s), adapted to modern safety standards.

Crowdfunding and very smart planning helped making sure the project was developed at its best with a budget of 1.5 million Euros: the interior spaces – lobby, restaurant and bar, hotel rooms, and apartments – feature indeed existing pieces and found objects (some from Caritas' own thrift store, others donated by former residents or by the local population) reassembled by AllesWirdGut under the supervision of Daniel Büchel into tables, nightstands, and wall coat racks (the Picasso inspired ones recreating his "Bull's Head" made from the seat and handlebars of a bicycle are particularly funny…) and integrated in a palette of reduced colours and in a vintage atmosphere.

In the future, the ground floor will serve as an entrance area and lobby for hotel guests, a shared living room for the young people staying in the house, and a bar and restaurant for visitors to encourage the integration of "foreigners", whether they may be guests, customers, or refugees.

"magdas Hotel is a social business that connects cultures and people, that creates opportunities and a lively place of encounter," stated in an official press release Caritas Social Business manager Clemens Foschi about this project that could be considered as extremely inspiring not just design-wise for the creative solutions it offers, but for the concept behind it.

In a world that talks too enthusiastically and too much about luxury and ultra-luxury architectures and design for very few ones, a space dedicated to socio-cultural exchanges between people from different backgrounds should indeed be praised and adopted by/adapted to other cities and countries.