University of Applied Arts Vienna

Kings, Queens and Broadways: A Project for a new University of Applied Arts Vienna

The brief was not to create a new building, but to expand the existing Ferstel and Schwanzer-Wörle buildings in a way that would create more space for research and education. The driving force of the design was found by studying the history of the existing buildings. On 5 July 1957, we discovered, a meeting took place at the Austrian Ministry of Commerce in Vienna, during which the architect of the University of Applied Arts, Ceno Kosak, demanded that the architects of the new building, Karl Schwanzer and Eugen Wörle, make certain improvements. Kosak submitted a comprehensive and critical statement the following year, in which he demanded greater room depths and the elimination of an unnecessary central corridor.

Kosak demonstrated how he envisioned this implementation in a schematic drawing. The number (twenty-one) and length (3.9m, or 13 ft) of the axes would remain the same, but the two central rows of supports would be replaced by a single line within the central axis, which would open up the structure and introduce greater permeability, lightness and better utilization of the volume. Whether deliberate or not, Kosak’s intervention exhibited a more progressive approach than Schwanzer and Wörle, along with Max Fellerer, had originally intended. Kosak’s move was extremely interesting for us, as we were also seeking more space in the university’s existing buildings, just as he had done fifty-four years earlier. By eliminating the corridor, the space became a productive surface.

 This was not just an economic measure; it was much more far-reaching in that it disposed of the circulation areas as an architectural topos, turning a three-aisled building into a two-aisled one.

In 2012, we were sitting around the drafting table, as Wörle, Schwanzer and Kosak had done in 1958, and continuing their game. But we wanted to branch out from their ideas, and move the circulation areas that remained: removing the staircases and lift cores and freeing up the entire space for studios, workshops and laboratories.

This provided usable floor space that already existed, and meant the circulation areas could be built somewhere else. Thus both brief and project changed: it was not usable floor space that needed to be added, but rather circulation-serving elements, or ‘figures’. In addition to the necessary figures of the ‘King’ and ‘Queen’ (the lift and fire escape), a proposed third figure – the ‘Broadway’ – runs diagonally across the building grid. This spatial element engages the seventeen different studies of the school in dialogue; the disciplines are no longer separated. The new figures – ‘King’, ‘Queen’ and ‘Broadway’ – are not set on the ground, but are structurally suspended from the now-empty framework of the Schwanzer-Wörle building. Combined with the surrounding membrane, a tension structure stretching between the floor and roof of the building transfers forces into this empty framework. The standing grid and hanging network of cables opens up a tension between the emptied building shell and the play of figures. The project represents yet another change in attitude in the planning history of the building – no longer shifting and editing its structural grid, but instead creating a new relationship of forces, establishing new dependencies and adjusting zones of interaction, while simultaneously allowing the different construction components to engage with each other.

Here, we are participating in the history of revisions, erasures, extractions and additions, reaching back into the past, as if in a science-fiction film, to change the future – to move ahead.