LIVING TOGETHER: NEW YORK & VIENNA
with artist Zara Pfeifer und architecture journalist Daniel Jonas Roche

TUESDAY, 29 July 2025, 7 pm

Fotomuseum WestLicht 

The lecture will be held in English

Admission with valid exhibition ticket 

Please register with: anmeldung@westlicht.com 

In the lecture “Living Together: New York and Vienna”, two perspectives come together: the long-term photographic observation by Zara Pfeifer and the journalistic analysis by Daniel Jonas Roche. Together, they explore cooperative housing in Vienna and New York – as a model, a reality, and a lived utopia.

The starting point is Pfeifer’s current project “Thank you, Herman Jessor,” parts of which are on view in the exhibition CHANGING PERSPECTIVES at WestLicht. At its center is the work of American architect Herman Jessor, who, since the 1950s, designed over 40,000 apartments for cooperatively organized housing complexes – including Co-op City in the Bronx, which remains one of the largest cooperative housing developments in the world today.

Alongside her photographic engagement with cooperative housing during her 2023 New York residency, Pfeifer also presents filmic approaches and draws comparisons to the well-known Viennese housing development Alterlaa, which she portrayed in depth in her project “Du, meine konkrete Utopie” (You, My Concrete Utopia) from 2013 to 2017.

In dialogue, Pfeifer and Roche shed light on how ideas of communal living are reflected in the urban housing of metropolises like New York and Vienna – and invite the audience to reflect on architecture as a social sphere of action.

Zara Pfeifer lives and works in Berlin and Vienna. Her work has been exhibited at, among others, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and the 2025 Architecture Biennale in Venice. Her publications have appeared in Monocle, ZEITmagazin, and Monopol. She received an artist residency grant from the Austrian Federal Government at ISCP New York and is a 2025/26 fellow of the MAK Schindler Scholarship in Los Angeles. Pfeifer studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and photography at the Friedl Kubelka School for Artistic Photography. Since 2019, she has been teaching photography in architecture at TU Vienna.

Daniel Jonas Roche works as a journalist for The Architect’s Newspaper. He has taught at The New School and Kean University and has been a guest critic at numerous institutions including Columbia GSAPP, Cooper Union, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. His writing has appeared in e-flux, Brooklyn Rail, Faktur, PLAT, Pidgin, ARCHITECT, and the New York Review of Architecture. Together with Andrew Santa Lucia, Roche is working on the book Antifascist Architecture (Park Books, 2025), illustrated by Lane Rick.

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