Wieder Absichten

Repurposing

The repurposing of buildings and other structures in Austria, Europe—anywhere on the planet really—is always intriguing, and to our way of thinking, a sound idea to save history, the environment, and the soul of a place. In Lincoln as in Vienna, it is fairly commonplace to see a train station transformed into a restaurant, a factory remodeled for apartments or office space, a barn rebuilt to shelter people instead of cattle.
We fully expected to see Austrian banks, hotels, private or government offices, apartments housed in what used to be palaces, and we’ve not been disappointed. But we’ve seen re-purposing in Austria that we’ve not yet before observed.


In Leoben, for instance, the convent dating from the 1500s on the river Mur, was re-purposed in about 1900 to be a prison (insert the joke of your choice here). Last year, preserving as much of the original structure as possible, the once-convent-prison was painstakingly repurposed again into a gorgeous shopping mall – with a food court and everything! (The Styrian prisoners have been relocated to the hills.)


Here in Vienna, the imperial stables were repurposed a decade ago. The 15-acre Hapsburg horse hotel is now the Museum’s Quartier ( http://www.mqw.at/fset_en.htmlone). Housing museums, cafes, dance clubs, libraries, and gift shops, it is one of the ten largest cultural complexes in the world. The stable smell is gone, but all the lovely arches, staircases, viewing stands, and equestrian-themed embellishments on every doorway remain.
But what about repurposing something even larger than 15-acres? Let’s say you had 4 brick cylinders, each 300 feet tall and 200 across, which were originally built in 1896 to hold coal gas (dry-distilled from coal) before it was distributed to Vienna’s gas network. What would you do with them when you no longer needed to store coal gas? How about connecting them with sky bridges and creating a city within a city? The “Gasomter” project was completed in 2001 and now holds apartments, banks, stores, a 3,000-seat music hall, restaurants, movie theatres, historical archives, student dorms, offices (http://www.wiener-gasometer.at/en/). Brilliant, eh?

Please read the next blog entry for the most sobering repurposing of all.