Gas explosion.

Eric Owen Moss's proposal for the re-use of a gas holder in Vienna energetically colonises redundant space with a series of complex eruptions and interpenetrations.

Eric Owen Moss enjoys a tough challenge. His work always seems to find itself in places where it has to fight to establish architectural meaning. In Los Angeles, Moss has energetically infiltrated the previously unremarkable warehouse zone of Culver City with a series of eruptions and interpenetrations which provide moments of ornate placemaking (AR September 1992). Now, on the outskirts of Vienna, Moss has been asked to insert public housing into a renowned but disused gasometer, to re-work an object which already possesses strong cognitive identity.

The gasometer is one of four aligned in the flat and rather tatty landscape between Vienna's airport and the old city. With its function as a container of natural gas long obsolete, the brick carcass has sheltered sporadic cultural events before this latest proposal for re-use. Moss is trying to integrate such events into his strategy for apartment units (124 in all), but has to respect the existing all-encompassing drum a historic monument - with its punched openings aligned vertically in 18 identical bays.

The architect cannot adjust this external pattern - the only source of lateral illumination. Nor may he support his interventions on the older brick walls. Thus the game becomes one of complex insertions.

While specifics of structure, materiality and unit planning have yet to be resolved, the gasometer as reinterpreted by Moss plays on dialectical relationships between old and new, between solid and void, between grounded and floating. In the gaps between external opening, segmental wedges are formed, stacks of acutely-shaped apartments setting up a radial energy. High above is a truncated cone, hovering above the wedges and protruding over the castellated parapet to fill the envelope of the original shallow dome. This bung or shuttlecock (Moss calls it a 'gyro') contains duplex apartments spreading towards the light, capped with a panoramic cafe.

More important than the individual pieces is the resultant space between them. There are of course those gaps - viewing chasms - between the wedges. There is the interim and somewhat vorticist separation between the wedges and the gyro above. Although Moss may yet have to seal some of the lower public or shared functions, the intention is that all of these slots between the apartments will be open to the elements, bringing light and air down into the belly of the scheme. It is there, between the plinth and wedges and gyro, that the architect makes his boldest spatial move - a cave-like piazza, formed of pentagonal sides, a civic room in globular liaison with its neighbours.

Multi-dimensional configuration is Moss's forte. Simultaneously attracted to cognitive form (the play of volumes in Los Angeles's smoggy light) and to a kind of messy dynamism (flashes of funk and Expressionism), the architect talks about 'reciprocity in favour of the new', pushing what already exists towards some new potential. Is this appropriate for low-cost housing? Probably not, if its inhabitants want suburban gardens and homely identification. But these disused gasometers could appeal to adventurous urbanites appreciative of extraordinary design and experimental communality. In the discussion of new housing prototypes, Moss's could be a contender.