High-rise project Wien Mitte
The Wien Mitte high-rise project was planned by Laurids Ortner and discussed in various planning variants from 1990 to 2003, which envisaged a high-density office and service center in the immediate vicinity of Vienna's Ringstrasse and thus to the inner city.
prehistory
As the first inner - city skyscraper in Vienna , the Ringturm still met with a largely positive response in the mid-1950s. Among other things, it appeared on election posters together with Roland Rainer's newly built town hall and the text “so that Vienna can become a global city again”. However, as in other European cities (e.g. Munich or Berlin ) in the course of the 1960s, the climate of opinion turned, among other things, from the debate about the horticultural high-rise . This situation remained more or less stable until around the mid-1980s, when representatives of the architectural community, namely the Architekturzentrum Wien and investors, showed ever greater interest in inner-city buildings with optimal transport connections.
Wien Mitte as an attempt to reverse the trend
Shortly after the decision of the jury (in April 1990) for the Ortner'sche variant of the Viennese museum quarter , which included a high-rise building - the so-called reading tower - providing for the immediate Ring Road area, was Laurids Ortner in October 1990 as a result of an expert process with the Planning for a further major project close to the city center was entrusted: the development in the area of Wien Mitte station . The media response was predominantly positive in relation to the setting of “urban development accents” through inner-city high-rise buildings (such as the Museum Quarter). However, as in the case of the reading tower, there was clear resistance from various citizens' initiatives . In contrast, the proponents of the project, essentially the real estate company of the then still community-based Bank Austria , took the line that the new high-rise center would bring about an upgrade of the station, which had become an "eyesore".
In view of the slump in the real estate economy at the beginning of the 1990s and the priority development of the Donau City high-rise district on the Neue Donau, the Wien Mitte project with its cost-intensive track construction fell behind. From November 1999, the proponents of the project made another attempt.
The end
The Vienna-Mitte Justice Center, which had meanwhile grown considerably larger, now encountered growing public resistance. Now the former mayor Helmut Zilk turned against the large-scale construction project, for whose approval he made personnel changes in the advisory board for urban planning jointly responsible. In May 2000, the Vienna City Council approved the construction project, but a number of well-known architects, including Roland Rainer , Gustav Peichl and Friedrich Kurrent, spoke out against it in the media.
The decisive factor for the failure of the project was ultimately the resistance of ICOMOS and UNESCO , who saw the project in the so-called buffer zone of the world heritage area in contradiction with the declaration of the city center as a world cultural heritage , which Vienna wanted . On the part of the investors, too, a certain distance had now arisen from the heavily controversial project. Only the Justice Center Wien-Mitte was completed as part of the Wien Mitte high-rise project. The follow-up project by architects Henke & Schreieck dispenses with signal-setting towers. Construction started in October 2007, partial commissioning took place at the end of 2012, and the mall was fully commissioned in April 2013.
literature
- Dieter Klein , Martin Kupf , Robert Schediwy : Stadtbildverluste Wien - a look back at five decades . Lit Verlag, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-8258-7754-X .
- Initiative planning (publisher): Saubermänner - Project for building the Vienna-Mitte train station . In: Citizen participation in Vienna, contributions to urban research, urban development, urban design, urban planning Vienna. Volume 54, Vienna 1994
- Reinhard Seiß: Who is building Vienna? Verlag Anton Pustet, Salzburg-Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-7025-0538-7 . P. 51 ff.
Web links
Coordinates: 48 ° 12 ′ 23 ″ N , 16 ° 23 ′ 5 ″ E