Vienna’s State Conservator once described the Leiner building on Mariahilferstraße as an ‘eyesore’. Built in 1894/95 as the department store ‘Zur großen Fabrik – Stefan Esders’, it was subsequently adapted and upgraded many times. In 2017, when it was acquired by the entrepreneur Renè Benko and his Signa Group, its external appearance offered barely a hint of its original substance. The many difficulties of adapting the building meant that this was considered uneconomical from a logistical perspective. Instead, it was decided to replace it with a new department store.
This triggered a media-driven argument about the demolition that was largely focussed on the historic staircase. The Federal Monuments Authority finally concluded that, while the staircase was indeed ‘really beautiful’ from a conservation perspective, it was not ‘worthy of special protection’. The rest is history. The Leiner building was demolished and a competition was organized, which was won by the Rotterdam architectural office OMA. The construction of the new ‘Lamarr’ started in 2022.
There has been no work on the site on Vienna’s Mariahilferstraße since February 2024. The insolvency of the Signa Group is seen as the largest of the Second Republic and has had far-reaching consequences for many Austrian and German city centres. In Austria, the huge concrete shell of the building has come to symbolize the collapse of the company and its reckless approach to the real estate business.
The polemic surrounding the demolition of the Leiner building and the shell of the Lamarr department store will be the starting point of our project. Alongside developing ideas for dealing with this shell, students will also discuss the ecologically highly topical question of the ‘disposal’ of fully functional built substance. In order to shed light on the social dimension of the new building, the extraordinary life of the Vienna-born Hedy Kiesler Lamarr, after whom the store was named for marketing purposes, will also play a role. Her most famous film, ‘Ekstase’ (Ecstasy), created a scandal due to the first nude scene in cinema history. She later worked as an inventor and developed a variation of the frequency hopping method that is still used in smartphones today.
The students should use one of the buildings – the one in its final state prior to demolition or the other in its current shell form – as the basis for their design. The focus of the project is neither the supposed listed nature of the buildings nor the need to fill them with new functions but, rather, an architectural investigation of the typological characteristics of these two forms of consumer architecture and the question of how they should be adapted to accommodate a range of actors in dense proximity.
Methods:
The course will show how architecture is permanently associated with transformation, with shifts in social relationships, and that the challenge is to capture these in theoretical and social-spatial terms. This is why the entire project will be accompanied by the reading of theoretical texts, the preparation of sketches and drawings and the construction of physical models as key instruments for thinking about and developing architecture in the city centre. Accompanying assignments, input lectures at the start of the exercises and a workshop will support the deeper investigation, collective discussion and conceptual refining of the individual projects.
Lecturers:
Harald Trapp
Gerhard Flora
further information:
Kick-Off: Tue, October 8th, 2024, 14:00, in Seminarraum CA 0322
Meetings every tuesday 14:00 – 18:30.