Vienna 3: Shopping

Gasometers, Vienna, Austria (Photographer: Michiel van Raaij)

It is one of the fringes of the city where the four giant Gasometers are sited. Half a dozen metro stations away from the old city center one enters an unedited landscape in which these converted gasholders are the utopian island next to autistic steel warehouses and generic glass-steel office buildings. Programmatically filled with hundreds of apartments, a shopping center, and offices, these Gasometers are like a bomb that landed, but didn’t go off and left its surroundings unaffected.

No Guggenheim-effect here, yet, but an adjacent plot seems to be developed. From the metro station one enters under a multi-colored glass canopy signaling the commercial frenzy inside. The first four stories of the complex are programmed with a shopping center, and entertainment facilities like a cinema. Nine stories with apartments top that. Each Gasometer is ‘filled’ by a different architect - Jean Nouvel, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Manfred Wehdorn, Wilhelm Holzbauer.

Gasometers, Vienna, Austria (Photographer: Michiel van Raaij)

Gasometers, Vienna, Austria (Photographer: Michiel van Raaij)

The starchitects do their trick: Jean Nouvel does something shiny, Wolf Prix (of Coop Himmelb(l)au) does something deconstructivist. Predictable, but the reflections in of the steel-clad facades of Nouvel are amazing, and the deconstructivist in-between spaces are fascinating and inviting. Prix also designed the only slab that is put outside the round monumental old brickwork facades of the –meters. The slanted design is passed ‘hip’ – every architect now designs similar forms. But with Prix’ design it feels coherent and right.

Coop Himmelb(l)au - Gasometers, Vienna, Austria (Photographer: Michiel van Raaij)

Coop Himmelb(l)au - Gasometers, Vienna, Austria (Photographer: Michiel van Raaij)

Looking up from the Shopping Center onto the dwellings designed by Jean Nouvel,
Vienna, Austria (Photographer: Michiel van Raaij) 

Shopping inside the Gasometers, Vienna, Austria (Photographer: Michiel van Raaij)

The Gasometer designed by Manfred Wehdorn seems to be the most sensible for living. The terraced, white space is light and green. Personally I pity the people living in the glossy all reflecting space designed by Nouvel, or the Plattenbau-like round space designed by Prix. Making something fresh is not the same as making something inhabitable. 

Looking up onto the dwellings designed by Manfred Wehdorn,
Vienna, Austria (Photographer: Michiel van Raaij)

Living in the Gasometers, Vienna, Austria (Photographer: Michiel van Raaij)

Looking down to the roof of the Shopping Center, Vienna, Austria (Photographer: Michiel van Raaij)

Curiously as a type the new configuration of the Gasometers resembles that of the old shopping galleries in the old city – a passageway lined with shops culminating in round courtyards that open up onto the sky with a round glass roof, and whose walls are livened by apartment-windows. In the case of the Gasometers the courtyards are bigger, but the combination of shopping and dwelling seems equally right.

Shopping gallery in the citycenter of Vienna, Austria (Photographer: Michiel van Raaij)