Lentia 2000

The two tallest towers in the east elevation

View from the Pösmayersteig to the Lentia complex

The Lentia 2000 is a complex of buildings , which in the years 1973 to 1977 as a mixed complex in Linz district Urfahr was built and expanded from 2007 by 2010. It is named after the Roman fort Lentia . The approximately pentagonal area of the complex is 6,760 m². The architect was Heinz Stögmüller from Linz, who worked and is almost exclusively in Linz.

The complex, which was controversial at the time because of its appearance, contains 470 apartments, a three-level underground car park, many shops and offices, and a vocational college . The construction came about due to the high demand for living space at the end of the 1960s, as the complex was able to provide a lot of living space comparatively quickly and cheaply. The building site between Schmiedegasse and Blumenstrasse became vacant when the Schaffer carpentry shop , which had previously been located there, fell victim to a fire.

Since the generous expansion in 2010, the shopping arcade has been called Lentia City .

Ownership structure and management

The apartments in Lentia 2000 are condominiums , which means that the mix of private and business owners results in complicated ownership structures. In order to coordinate the interests of the private owners, a separate association was founded which, among other things, acts as a contact person for construction issues. It is thanks to the initiative of this association that, after years of disputes over the renovation of the facade and the underground car park, at the end of 1997 the ÖVP -related association Wohnungsfreunde resigned from the property management of the Lentia 2000 so that the necessary renovation could be carried out.

From 1998 the Lentia 2000 was managed by the Raiffeisen Group for Housing Construction (GWB) . After a planned merger of GWB-Wohnungfreunde, the owners switched to property management of the Society for Urban Renewal and Assanierung (GSA) in 2010 . Since January 1, 2015, the administration of the Gemeinnützige Vermietungs- und Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH (gvvg) , a Lawog subsidiary.

Building construction

View from the shopping street of the Christmas decorations and one of the residential towers

On the ground floor there has been a shopping arcade with a large supermarket and numerous other shops and a post office on the entire area since 1979 . 2007 was the renewal and expansion of shopping mall for Lentia City started.

Most of the offices are located on the second floor of Lentia 2000. From 1979 to the completion of the Lentos in 2003, the exhibition rooms of the New Gallery of the City of Linz were also located in the complex, on the floor above the shops. These rooms are now used as business space. Above the second floor there is an accessible garden level with smaller green areas and the access paths to the residential buildings.

There are two underground parking garages. One with around 450 parking spaces on three levels is intended for customers in the shopping arcade; the other (with two levels) belongs mainly to the owners of the 470 apartments.

The tallest building (Blumenstrasse 23) is 59 meters high and has 21 floors. The second highest (Blumenstrasse 21) has 13 floors and a height of 36 meters. The remaining buildings are between four and eight floors high and are located in a frame around the two tallest buildings.

The entire complex can be accessed with wheelchairs.

shopping mall

The mall after the expansion

The shopping mall was originally owned by the former Property Management apartment friends and later to the Admont sold. From 1996 onwards, a large part of the business space was bought by PlusCity boss Ernst Kirchmayr for Kirchmayr & Pfeiffer GmbH . The aim from the beginning was to design the shopping arcade based on the PlusCity model in Pasching and expand it to the main street.

The renovation could not be started for a long time because only one of the 600 co-owners of the Lentia 2000 refused to approve. Kirchmayr therefore went to court , and it turned out that this co-owner was a straw man for the founder of the Kirchmayr competition UNO Shopping Leonding , Josef Handlbauer. At the court hearing in February 2006 , the court ruled that the blockade of the expansion was an abuse of law and that the expansion plans could be implemented.

The renovation work had been in progress since summer 2007, and a first section was opened at the end of November 2007. The extension to the main street was built in 2009-2010; The number of parking spaces for visitors to the shopping center was increased to 460. The opening took place on November 18, 2010.

Currently (2014) there are 55 shops and restaurants in Lentia City, on two levels. The underground car park is available to visitors free of charge for 2 hours.

Other facilities

Playgrounds on the garden level

In addition to the apartments and shops, there are a few other facilities in the Lentia 2000 :

In the heart of the complex is the Higher Federal College ( HBLA ) Lentia for product management and presentation and fashion and clothing technology
The Kindergarten Schwalbennest of Caritas on the garden level.
Headquarters of the FPÖ Upper Austria
Since 2008 the premises of AIDS-Hilfe Upper Austria

Until 2000, the state youth hostel was also located in one of the buildings.

Architectural style and meaning

The multifunctional complex built on the American model, which was built entirely from reinforced concrete, is unique in Linz and a rarity in Austria. Only the multifunctional high-rise buildings in the Alt-Erlaa residential park in Vienna can be compared with the Lentia 2000 . The planning of buildings, which had long been well advanced in the USA and were supposed to combine as many facilities as possible under one roof in order to keep the distances to be covered as short as possible (prime example Marina City in Chicago ), was in Austria at the beginning of the 1970s. For years it was still relatively unknown, which is why it was necessary to agree to the Lentia 2000 project . The name alone suggests that there was more to the project than just creating living space and jobs. People wanted to take a look into the future, or rather thought they had found the concept of the house of the future . At least they wanted to try. The tallest tower initially had a laundry shaft - atypical for Austria - through which dirty clothes were carried directly into the washrooms in the basement. However, this was closed after an indefinite period.

Others

VA Tech Elin EBG was entrusted with the technical management from 2001 to September 2006 ; Tiefenbacher Facility GmbH, Traun, has been responsible for this since October 2006 .

In 1978 there was an application to feed cable television into the network of the “Lentia 2000” residential complex in Linz, which was rejected because of the ORF monopoly that was stipulated by law at the time. Then there was a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights , which forwarded the case to the European Court of Justice . The judgment provided for an imperative to open up the Austrian broadcasting landscape.

Web links

Commons : Lentia 2000 - collection of images, videos and audio files

HBLA Lentia - Vocational secondary school in the Lentia complex
The Lentia 2000 case - opening of the ORF broadcasting monopoly by legal means (PDF; 27 kB)