Florian Ocenasek

Work and Meet

A workspace built at full scale from rammed earth, clay and straw.

Year

Summer 2026

Studio

Act of Building, Act III, "Practicing Transformation" · TU Wien

With

BC architects & studies & materials

Team

Natenael Eshaw Abebe, Lena Erk, Ema Hocevar, Clemens Langeder, Daniil Makhmudov, Florian Ocenasek, Miriam Semler, Ana Sovic

Built in

Reallabor, Kleine TVFA-Halle, Gusshausstraße 28, Vienna

Supervision

Thomas Amann

Work and Meet ran in the second half of the summer semester 2026, after Roof 2100, and it took the learnings from Roof 2100 and the earlier Act of Building projects into real practical application. Teams of students designed and built a kitchen, a work and meet area and a read and rest area inside the Reallabor at TU Wien. The interventions make the space far more inviting and practical to use, and they raise the comfort of every course that uses it after us. Applying theory to a real project was challenging, but the process was genuinely fun and rewarding, and everyone involved can be proud of the result.

All three interventions seen along the hall, the kitchen counter at the left, the work and meet bench in the middle, the read and rest niche at the right
All three interventions in the Reallabor, kitchen, work and meet, read and rest

Our piece of the hall is 2.66 metres wide, 80 centimetres deep and 3.15 metres high. The bench is rammed earth, the base rammed on site into formwork we built for it and the seat modules prefabricated, rammed rough, ground to their final form and oiled with linseed oil. The movable furniture stacks into itself and disappears completely into the bench. Overhead, curved panels of Japanese knotweed and loam carry the built-in lighting, and a mounted beamer projects onto the wall opposite, with the light switch and the HDMI routing integrated into the build. The wall behind is plastered in clay, sand and brick dust, and the chairs and the table are made from the formwork timber that had just come off the bench.

A workspace built at full scale from rammed earth, clay and straw.
In use, with the beamer on the rack above
The bench, counter and shelving seen along the wall
The table and stools, pulled out of the bench
Drawing sheet at 1 to 10 with the elevation, plan and section of the bench, plus details of the timber profile and the clay arches
Elevation, plan, section and details, 1:10
Ten axonometric steps showing the build sequence from formwork and bricks through rammed earth, plaster, timber structure, panels and masonry to the finished furniture
The build in ten steps, with the material quantities each one took
The eight-person team sitting along the finished bench under the lit knotweed panels
The team, on the bench

Thank you to Thomas Amann for initiating and guiding this project, to Bregt Hoppenbrouwers, Henri Uijtterhagen and Laurens Bekemans of BC architects for their input and criticism, and to Wienerberger and Wiener Linien for supporting the research. All photographs by Paul Sebesta.

The Act of Building, BC architects ↗ Reallabor open house, TU Wien ↗ Act of Building, Practicing Transformation · Gebäudelehre TU Wien ↗