Industrial monument preservation in Austria- A survey - Denkmalpflege

Industrial monument
preservation in
Austria-
A survey
ATHENS programme
Ao. Univ. Prof. Dr. Gerhard A. Stadler

The beginnings of industrial monument preservation in Austria date back to the early days of the
First Republic. The Federal Act for Monument Preservation was adopted in 1923 and created the
basis for the comprehensive protection of monuments, including technical monuments. In addition,
in 1925, a separate department was set up with responsibility for industrial history and technical
monuments under the direction of the head of the Numismatic Department, August Loehr.
A key object in the focus on technical monuments proved to be Wheel Mill (“Radwerk”) number IV
in Vordernberg / Styria. Vordernberg had been a centre of iron smelting on the Styrian Erzberg
since the 15 th century, and consisted of 14 ironworks, which were numbered along the course of the
Vordernberg Stream and referred to as “wheel mills” after the water wheels used to drive the
bellows. When the enterprise, the Austrian-Alpine Mining und Iron Works Company concentrated
crude iron production at the Donawitz and Eisenerz works, the Vordernberg wheel mills ceased to
have any useful value. In 1928, Wheel Mill number IV, constructed in 1846, was placed under
protection as the first technical monument in Austria.
In addition, the monument preservation experts also turned their attention to old bridge structures,
the horse-drawn railways, weir and lock systems, water mills and windmills, glass works, potteries
and stove making workshops, the textile and the brewing industries as well as the Augarten
Porcelain Factory.
This successful era of industrial monument preservation in the 1920s and 1930s was rudely
interrupted by the events and effects of the war. Although even during the first years of the war
important witnesses to iron smelting in Carinthia were placed under protection, namely the fluid
furnaces at Lölling and in the Urtlgraben district in 1939, followed by the blast furnace at Hirt in
1941.
The devastating effects of the Second World War led to a lasting and ultimately decade-long
interruption to industrial monument preservation activities in Austria. The fact that there was no
time to secure or document industrial monuments in the years of national post-war reconstruction
was above all due to the concentration of preservation work on the inventory of traditional
monuments. In addition, after August Loehr’s retirement, the Department for Historic Industrial
Monuments lost its innovative drive, the post not being filled for lack of personnel.
Moreover, the term “industry” was tainted with the stigma of annihilation. Industry being associated
with the war economy, the production of “important war materials” using slave labour, and above
all the production of military equipment and armaments, no-one had any desire to preserve the
memory of this period in the form of industrial monuments.
In the territories of Austria occupied by the western allies, destroyed and out-dated production
facilities were rebuilt or modernised with the powerful assistance of the European Recovery
Program, the so called Marshall Plan, with the result that much of what had survived the war fell
victim to this energetic replacement activity. And when the occupying powers left Austria to its
own devices after the return of sovereignty, the process of renewal was repeated in the northern and
eastern provinces, where the Soviet occupying forces had not shown any ambitions whatsoever in
the direction of reconstruction.
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It was not until the end of the 1960s that a spectacular rescue campaign drew attention to industrial
monument preservation in Austria. The scene was once again Vordernberg in Styria, where, back in
1928, Wheel Mill number IV had been the first technical monument to be placed under protection
in the country.
In 1968, the plan was to demolish Wheel Mill number X, which had been in decay for decades. The
fluid furnace of the Wheel Mill, first mentioned in 1440, had been given its present form in the
middle of the 19 th century, and the monumental structure of the almost 20-metre high blast furnace
had become the town’s landmark. The explosives had already been put into position when
preservation was announced at literally the last minute.
But while destruction was just about prevented in Vordernberg, the “patricide” took place in Linz /
Upper Austria; the demolition of the Linz Woolen Factory meant the loss of one of Europe’s most
important buildings from the mercantile age.
The factory was constructed from 1722 to 1726 according to plans by Johann Michael Prunner, and
both its dimensions and the architectural implementation of production and administration
embodied the type of the château industriel. The factory’s historical value was reflected both in the
industrial and socio-political importance of the enterprise, and in its architectural and urban
development accents. Using the forms of baroque monastery and palace architecture, the attempt
had been made to overcome mass production as an architectural problem.
The building had been used as a “factory barracks” by the army since the middle of the 19 th century,
and had provided emergency accommodation to numerous refugees from the war in 1945/46. It was
put under protection by the Federal Monument Preservation Office in 1948, when the factory
transferred from state ownership to the property of the Austrian Tobacco Company. The survival of
the factory palace was to be secured through use as an academy of applied arts or to accommodate
departments of the new University for Social and Business Sciences; consideration was also given
to the construction of apartments.
But things did not turn out this way. Ignorance combined with a lack of expertise on the part of
decision makers and politicians led to the demolition of the factory palace in autumn 1969. State
monument preservation had also failed, having neither means not strategies for rescuing the factory,
even if “the special character of the category of technical monuments means that efforts for
preservation are considerably more problematic than for conventional types of monuments.”
Despite, or perhaps because of the regrettable loss of the wool factory, industrial monument
preservation in Austria underwent a marked boom in the 1970s. This was due on the one hand to the
events of 1968, one of the consequences of which was an opening up of the ossified university
structures, leading to academic discourse turning its attention to previously neglected fields of
research, and on the other hand to the international awakening of industrial monument preservation
in the wake of the establishment of industrial archaeology.
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The oil crisis of 1973 that brought the western hemisphere to a standstill and demonstrated the
vulnerability of a globally networked economy also produced the idea of “limits to growth”.
Academic involvement with the phenomena of industrial history and industrial sociology became a
focal point of a new student generation; social history in the form of “grass-roots history” addressed
the industrial working class threatened with extinction, while economic history aimed at
disentangling the world-wide network of industrial capitalism, the history of technology attempted
to come to terms with the rapid scientific and technical progress of industrial production, and
environmental history hoped to explain the global changes to our biosphere through
industrialisation as a consequence of human life and business activity.
Without doubt the most decisive impulse for a new beginning was given to industrial monument
preservation in Austria as a result of the establishment of industrial archaeology, whose aim was the
systematic research of the industrial heritage. The specialist world’s attention was caught by the
First International Congress on the Preservation of Industrial Monuments held in Ironbridge in
1973, an event that spread the fame of industrial archaeology far beyond the borders of Great
Britain.
The very conference venue, the Coalbrookdale Museum of Iron, was an incitement to imitation. The
euphoria that overcame the specialist world following the Ironbridge Congress also produced a
wave of museum foundations. The aim of all these institutions was to preserve historical production
centres in situ, where the visitors would be confronted with the world of work of the industrial age.
In Austria, the institutions and display mines already established were joined by a number of
museums of this new type. Examples are the Mining Museum and Display Mine founded in
Hüttenberg / Carinthia in 1978, the Petroleum Museum opened in Neusiedl an der Zaya / Lower
Austria in 1980 and the Coal Mining Museum inaugurated in Fohnsdorf / Styria in 1983. The north
of the country was dominated by textile production, as witnessed by the numerous weaving works
and dye works converted into small museums, brought together for visitors in the form of tourist
routes such as the Textile Road in Lower Austria and the so called Weaving Road in Upper Austria.
The variety of institutions of this kind, combined with all kinds of services for tourists, have
become increasingly popular over the years, with the result that industrial tourism was able to
develop into an admittedly small but indeed attractive and prosperous segment of the tourist
industry.
The intensive discussion of industrial culture was also reflected in the topics of numerous provincial
exhibitions. Their objectives were regarded as being the fields of cultural and educational policies,
but they were also based on aspects of monument preservation or scientific research, and always
pursued the promotion of tourism and the regional economy. The topics of “mining” or “the
industrial world of work” became extremely popular amongst the public, rewarding the organisers
with record visitor numbers time after time.
In Steyr / Upper Austria, the “Work/man/machine” Provincial Exhibition hit cultural policy
headlines in 1987 by attracting over 380,000 visitors. Its topic was the history of the industrial
world of work, the venue a disused factory on the Wehrgraben, the former main artery of industry
in Steyr. When the enterprise went bankrupt in 1981, the site ceased to function as a production
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facility. Finally, a museum association acquired part of the factory in 1985 with the intention of
adapting and reorganising it to create the “Museum of the Industrial World of Work”.
The Carinthian Provincial Exhibition entitled “Grubenhunt und Ofensau” held in Hüttenberg in
1995 was combined with a spectacular new building on the site of the Heft iron works. An attempt
was made in Carinthia to overcome the lasting shock triggered by the cessation of iron ore mining
at the end of the 1970s by means of a review of the “good old days”. The smelting works, located in
a valley basin on a loop of the Mosinzer Stream, had been closed as long ago as 1908, and the entire
facility had been placed under monument protection in 1983. For the exhibition, it was decided to
use an architectural project created by Günther Domenig.
By breaking away from its previous objectives and methods, which were almost exclusively
determined by art history, monument preservation broadened its scientific basis. Following the
international trend, the Federal Office for Monument Preservation decided in 1976 to fill the post of
Official for Technical Monuments that had been vacant since 1949, and, just as in the neighbouring
countries, a start was made on the stocktaking of the industrial heritage. Soon, urgent questions
arose as to what and to how. What technical monuments must be preserved? How can such facilities
together with their mechanical equipment be appropriately preserved, conserved or restructured to
create an object for display? Monument preservation here entered new terrain in order to satisfy
requirements that had previously been unknown. In the process, a variety of strategies developed for
preserving the industrial heritage.
The most favourable alternative from the point of view of monument preservation is to secure and
restore while largely maintaining the original function. The Linz works of the Austrian Tobacco
Company can be cited as an instance of the exemplary maintenance of an industrial monument. The
development of the Linz factory into a major modern enterprise was regarded as the crowning
moment of the reconstruction of the Austrian tobacco industry during the First Republic. Peter
Behrens and Alexander Popp applyied rationalist rules strictly and almost literally to create a
production facility that was described by the architectural historian Leonardo Benevolo as “without
doubt the best that was constructed on German soil after 1933.” Although the tobacco factory was
adapted on several occasions following its construction as new production machines were
integrated, nevertheless it underwent neither a serious change to its original function nor to its
external appearance.
As a rule, however, industrial monument preservation is faced with empty factories and devastated
industrial shells. The preservation of such facilities can often only be ensured by means of an
economically acceptable new utilisation. Revitalisation has hitherto proven to be the most
successful instrument in the preservation of industrial monuments, even if this continuing learning
process about the handling of historical buildings has occasionally led to the irrevocable loss of
both the identity and the substance of many a monument.
For instance, the conversion of the Granary on the Vienna Handelskai into a luxury hotel is
regarded as one such failure. The huge Granary building including the roof was built in the form of
a reinforced concrete framed structure, a design system that is reflected in the façade with its grid of
vertical supports and horizontal beams. The Granary remained in operation essentially unchanged
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until 1982. Ultimately, it was the high cost of demolishing the building, which had already been
condemned, that led to a new utilisation.
Conversion into a luxury hotel admittedly meant the survival of the dominant appearance on the
banks of the Danube, but additional buildings, the choice of material, surface finishing and detailed
implementation have robbed the protected Granary of its identity. The value of the building as an
industrial monument was sacrificed to the requirements of the new use.
That a new utilisation is indeed possible while retaining the appearance is shown for instance by the
redesign of the New Tobacco Factory in Krems-Stein / Lower Austria. The factory was constructed
in 1922 according to plans by the architect Paul Hoppe and remained essentially unchanged both
inside and outside. The reinforced concrete framed structure is characterised by the formal language
of a “third baroque”, and its huge dimensions make it an essential element of the urban silhouette.
The closure of the production facilities in the second half of the 1980s led the local council to make
use of the empty premises for the purposes of the Provincial Scientific Academy. The grid-like
ground plan made conversion easier. Following completion of the project in 1995, the main
building with its 15,000 m² floor space has become home to 32 department and seminar units of
what is now known as the Danube University.
The Himmelreich & Zwicker cloth factory at Linz / Upper Austria was long threatened by
demolition, and its rescue was an amazing success. The integration of a church and parish centre in
the premises of the former cotton spinning mill proved to be a spectacular and convincing reuse of
the industrial monument. The factory was constructed in 1908 as a cotton spinning mill. After it was
closed down, entrepreneurs from Brno and Krnov acquired the site and converted it into a cloth
factory in 1934 to 1938. In the 1950s and 1960s, the company, which processed sheep’s wool from
Australia and South America, experienced a second heyday. When the factory was closed in 1980,
the property underwent frequent changes of ownership, soon becoming an object of speculation. In
1986, a citizen’s action group succeeded in saving the cloth factory from the threat of demolition. It
was only with considerable difficulty that local politicians and monument preservers were only
prevented by a further act of barbarism – similar to the demolition of the Linz Woolen Factory three
decades earlier.
Stubborn negotiations finally led to the renovation and adaptation of the cloth factory in the late
1990s according to plans by the “Linz Architect Group”, who had been the winners of a
competition for the revitalisation of the cloth factory in 1991. The integration of the church in the
former factory is a convincing and without doubt one of the most remarkable new utilisations in the
whole of Austria.
It was also possible to prevent the ruin of the aero-mechanical laboratory of the Chair for Aerial
Navigation and Automobiles at Vienna University of Technology. The Chair was established in
1909 under the direction of Professor Richard Koller. The construction of the laboratory in 1911/12
was made possible by a generous donation from the industrialist Arthur Krupp.
The free-standing pavilion in the form of a basilica is broken down into three sections: the threestorey
central building is flanked by two one-storey wings each consisting of two rooms. Fully
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estored in 2002, and expanded for purposes of a restaurant by means of an additional building, the
“Wind tunnel” has today become a catering facility for students and teaching staff.
Obviously, this brief survey only constitutes a small sector of the group of technical monuments. It
should by no means be forgotten that numerous bridges, railway facilities, shipping canals,
steamships, hammer works, worker estates, entrepreneur villas and much more have also been
preserved or at least rescued. The field of industrial monument preservation is broad and
characterised by a sheer overwhelming variety.
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