Ritual of Cleansing – Pandemic Housing Prototype

Ritual of Cleansing is a pandemic housing prototype by Temporary Office that reorganizes apartment living around the act of washing, set within the dense urban context of Vienna, Austria. Conceived in 2020, the project responds to a moment when living in isolation forced many to rethink the notion of communal spaces and the importance of cleansing spaces. In a typical residential setting, shared amenities such as multi-function activity rooms, gyms, and swimming pools were closed off to stop the spread of the virus, raising a direct question: what alternatives allow inhabitants to live to the fullest during an extended isolation period?

Temporary Office answers this by introducing an open living concept in which all unit types have full exposure to nature, creating a sense of respite from the introverted living space typical of small apartments. The morphology of the building is driven by hygiene. Spaces for cleansing, the toilets and wash basins, are positioned in the building core, and all living spaces revolve around that cleansing core. This inversion of the usual plan treats the bathroom not as a leftover service zone but as the organizing ritual of daily life, a logic that aligns with the public health thinking that has long shaped modern housing.

Tower Aggregation and Distance

With a tower footprint of 16 meters by 16 meters, seven towers of 14 to 15 stories, sized for a density of roughly 400 occupants, are arrayed across the site in a linear fashion with a 7 meter gap between towers. Those gaps are key to introducing infill of greenery, threading planted voids between the volumes. Holding to the principle of isolated towers with full exposure to nature, all towers rotate at oblique angles to create a differentiated degree of privacy between them. As a result, the corners of each tower become social points where residents can meet on their balconies without coming into close contact of less than 3 meters.

Designing housing for a pandemic asks the same enduring questions that any apartment building must answer about light, air, privacy, and shared ground, but compresses them under the constraint of physical distance. By making separation and cleansing the generators of form, this prototype turns a public health emergency into an argument about how dense city living in places like Vienna might hold onto nature and contact at once. It reads less as a finished building than as a proposal worth testing the next time isolation reshapes the home.