DAM IMPRESSIVE

42 // CITY PORTRAIT
1,687,271
inhabitants
41,487 ha
area
136.5 km
length of city
boundary
151 m
lowest point
(Lobau)
543 m
highest point
(hermannskogel)
Neubau (7th district) are now the
trendy destinations they have become.
Vienna’s lohas (‘lifestyle of
health and sustainability’) have
taken up residence right behind the
museum complex, on the Spittelberg,
which was known previously
as the notorious ‘burlap district’
before it gained its upmarket leisure
reputation. Organic is the buzzword,
and Vienna’s most prominent
market, the Naschmarkt, has
latched onto the trend. On Fridays
and Saturdays, small farm producers
from Vienna’s surrounding areas
sell their organic produce to the lohas.
Shopping for heritage vegetables
is, after all, part of getting on.
Organic alongside
kosher
Near to the Naschmarkt, where a
gourmet paradise has grown up
alongside the fruit and vegetable
stalls, a new boom is underway in
the area around Karmeliter market.
Organic market stalls, kosher
butcheries, Turkish vegetable sellers
and small restaurants give it a
multicultural atmosphere. But it
is the area’s Jewish history that is
most present: in 1624, Emperor Ferdinand
II evicted all Jews from the
city centre and relocated them to
the Lower Werd – today’s Karmeliter
district. In the 19th century, as
Jewish life blossomed, the second
Viennese residential district became
known as the Matzo Island
(Mazzesinsel). It was here that Sigmund
Freud went to school, Arnold
Schönbrunn Palace St Stephen’s Cathedral
Schönberg lived, and Joseph Roth
wrote some of his most beautiful
works.
The district has since begun a process
of gentrification. First it was
the students, then the artists, and
finally the bobos (bourgeois bohemians)
who discovered the area and
settled into their converted lofts.
ALPINE also played a significant
role in the second district’s appreciation:
with 35,000 cubic metres
of reinforced concrete, 4,700 tons
of reinforcement, 40,500 square
metres of formwork, 22,000 square
metres of diaphragm wall, 2,700
metres of piles and 120 construction
workers, ALPINE extended the
U2 underground line beneath the
Danube Canal, diagonally across
Vienna’s second district all the way
to the Praterstadion. Of course,
improved accessibility means that
living and working in the area is
now a more attractive prospect.
Hence ‘Viertel Zwei’ (District Two),
a large-scale project currently underway
for which ALPINE constructed
the office buildings, one of
which presented a particular challenge
due to its height of 85 metres
and crescent-shaped footprint. The
entire project complex consists of
four office buildings, one hotel and
a residential building, and is set to
be completed by the end of 2010.
So Vienna is looking forward as well
as back – all the more so with the
construction of a new central railway
station (ALPINE is involved
through ARGE) on the site of the
Big wheel at Prater
Heldenplatz and Hofburg
old Südbahnhof (Southern Station).
This is not only set to make
the Austrian capital an ultramodern
transport hub, but will also give it a
completely new district.
Vienna –
worth living,
worth loving
Vienna is a city of waltzes and Jugendstil,
coffee-house culture and
horse-drawn carriages, vineyards
and Heuriger wine taverns, opera
balls and new year concerts, boys’
choirs and Lipizzaners, schnitzel
and Sachertorte. But it also a modern
metropolis. Even more importantly,
Vienna is worth living and
worth loving. After coming first
last year, Vienna was once again
nominated the world’s best city to
live in by the 2010 Mercer Report,
which compared 221 cities around
the globe.
Yet despite yielding to the winds
of time – and to star architects like
Zaha Hadid, Dominique Perrault,
Jean Nouvel and Coop Himmelb(l)au
– the Viennese love tradition,
and there would be nothing more
un-Viennese than feeling compelled
to be modern. //