Vienna:  Schillerplatz / Getreidemarkt / Naschmarkt

A University with a Highway running through it

The aim of this studio is to take a close and critical look at the area immediately surrounding the building we are using right now, between the Opernring and the Semperdepot, the Museumsquartier and the Karlsplatz. We are searching for ways to understand and intervene in that which is so close that we can hardly see it, so familiar that we dare not criticize it.

Our starting point is a direct question from Vienna Stadtrat Schicker, to do an urban design study in order to better connect the different educational insitutions that occupy a relatively small area, but are neither spatially or functionally connected with each other, and also to untie the Gordian knot of pedestrian, automobile and subway traffic that frustrates the logical and smooth use of these institutions. Because of the integral and complex nature of the question, we have decided to combine the ESC and GLC platforms in one studio. Our working hypothesis is this: could this part of Vienna not be understood as a University with a highway running through it, just like Paris has been described as a Library with a river running through it, with the permanently congested Getreidemarkt in the role of the Seine?

Being architects, and therefore torn between artistic soul-searching and technocratic problem solving tendiencies, we welcome this ‘commission’ by the city and yet use it to study ourselves, and our relationship to the city and to other educational institutions. This studio is the next step in the opening up of the Institute of Art and Architecture as a laboratory that works for the city, as well as an ivory tower in which we develope our own profession and cultivate our tastes and obsessions. In this way we humbly try to reconnect with the great tradition of historical figures like Otto Wagner and Roland Rainer, who worked from within this same Academy to steer the development of Vienna, and who have both left their traces in our area with fragments of radical masterplans for the Karlsplatz, the Naschmarkt and the Getreidemarkt.

The studio will consist of two phases: research and design. In the research phase we will use different methods to analyze, map and also to present the way we use, see and (mis)understand the area. By ‘We’ we mean the Viennese and the visitors to Vienna in general but more importantly, literally ourselves. The students and staff of the Academy and of other educational institutions will be tracked in their daily use of the buildings and the public space. We will also try and understand the area around Schillerplatz as one enormous megastructure, grown over time and consisting of infrastructural and architectural elements of different times, that have accumulated into one thick spongelike mass.

After the analytical phase, that will result in a number of maps, models and images that allow us to re-imagine the area, we will formulate different strategic scenarios to influence its development. Each of these scenarios will make use of realistic interventions of a limited scale, that through their combination will have a maximum pact on the whole. In this way we hope to show that there are alternatives for the classic urban planning masterplanning approaches that suggest total aesthetic and economic control of an entire urban area. Also we aim to demonstrate our ‘facts on the ground’ or ‘acupunctural’ approach with one or more real time interventions in real space.

In cooperation with:  Stadt Wien, MA 18,  MA 19, TU Vienna