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Guided Tours of the Museumsquartier, Karl Marx-Hof, the Gasometers, Donau City, the Kabelwerk or the Gänsehäufel can be booked at the Architekturzentrum Wien by blind and visually impaired people at any time, at office@azw.at or 01-522 31 15.
Feel models, touch surfaces, experience the atmosphere acoustically — this is what is offered by an architectural guided tour with the Architekturzentrum Wien for blind and visually impaired people.
Embark on the scouting expedition equipped with floor plans in Braille and tactile scale models, architectural features and the history of the completion of the projects are explained in more detail. Tactile models of the entire complexes or individual homes help participants of the guided tour to form a clearer impression of the scale and the proportions of the spaces described.
Guided tours are available of:
The Museumsquartier
Karl-Marx-Hof
Gasometer
Donau City
Kabelwerk
Gänsehäufel
The Museumsquartier
Summer can hardly be imagined today without the Museumsquartier and all of its museums, dance and youth theatres and pavement cafés. This has not always been so. Only 10 years ago it was a massive construction site.
At the beginning of the 18th century, when people still travelled on horseback, the Museumsquartier housed the court stables. Later (from 1922) the grounds were used for trades fairs and exhibitions. The Museumsquartier has only been the cultural site we know today since 2001. A location for museums and theatres, a place for dance, for digital culture and much more. Nevertheless, one is reminded of the 'olden days' in many places. We go into the foyer of Halls E+G and the Kunsthalle Wien. This building used to house the winter riding arena. The gallery is still here, from where an audience could watch the equestrian artistry below. Perhaps even Empress Sissy sat here and watched. There are only three real new buildings. They dominate the grounds, too: the white block is the Leopold Museum, the black box is the MUMOK contemporary art museum, and between the two is the Kunsthalle Wien. All of the other cultural facilities, including the Architekturzentrum Wien, for example, are situated in the restored, listed parts of the buildings.
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Karl Marx-Hof
Karl-Marx-Hof is, with a length of 1.2km, one of the largest and most famous buildings in Vienna. As an icon of Socialist Vienna housing developments of the 1920s and '30s, Karl Marx-Hof has branded itself into our minds. Especially noticeable are the towers and gateways in the central tract of the complex, which only contains a fraction of the 1,325 apartments.
The true architectural achievement consists, though, less in the design of this 'fortress-like' façade and more in the solution for the arrangement of the apartments on the narrow site so that they all profit equally from the large green areas in the three courtyards. Karl Marx-Hof has as many residents as a small town. A large number of housing projects were completed at the time of Red Vienna to ease an acute housing shortage and to improve the quality of the population's living conditions. At the time of Red Vienna, luxury meant running water and a WC in the home. In the housing complexes of Red Vienna there was also a range of additional facilities, such as washrooms, post offices, first aid centres, a library, advice bureaus etc. This made small cities within the city of the complex, and people no longer had to travel long distances to satisfy their basic needs.
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The Gasometers
In 1896 the City of Vienna built the gasometers in the style of industrial architecture — a gasometer is a gas storage tank. They have been out of commission since 1984. What is still on view today is only the shell of the building with the technological interior removed. The four gasometers, part of what was once the largest gas works in continental Europe, and a listed structure, was extended to form the core of a multifunctional district in the city.
Today the complex houses approx. 60,000 homes — both subsidised housing and privately owned apartments, a student hostel for 400 residents, a concert hall for up to 4,000 visitors, offices and a shopping centre. Primarily young families and students live here, in what is known as 'G-Town'. The apartments are housed in gasometers A, B and C, in a ring directly behind the outer wall — the middle is kept open. Only gasometer D has been built-up from the inside outwards — i.e. in the centre. What looks from the outside like a glass roof is actually just the frame of the old roof, so it can rain in.
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Donau-City
Donau City is situated directly above a freeway. It was roofed over with concrete slabs so that buildings could be erected here. In some places the different levels can still be seen: below the cars, above them a technical level and the pedestrians right at the top. This makes Donau City a car-free zone.
The grounds once envisaged for the Vienna-Budapest Expo in 1995 became a new urban expansion area following the roofing over of the freeway along the banks of the Danube. Since 1998 the area has been dominated by the construction of apartment complexes and high-rise office towers: about 3,500 people now live in Donau City, and 10 to 12,000 people work here. The Donau City residential park benefits from the attractive situation directly on the Neue Donau and is distinguished by social mix — from subsidised rental apartments to the freely financed penthouse. Donau City offers all of the features of a new urban district: workplaces, modern homes as well as leisure and culture facilities — only 8 minutes from the inner city by U-Bahn (the Metro).
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The Kabelwerk
A new City District has been developed on the grounds of the former Kabelwerk factory in Wien-Meidling on the basis of what is a unique planning process to date. Unusual in the process was that local residents, among others, had a say in the planning.
This project is colourful and marked by the variety of shapes. The entire site is a car-free zone and provides a varied living space for families (with a public square, cultural activities etc.). It is characterised by a rich mix of different types of architecture, from terraced housing to a high-rise. Alongside about 10,000 apartments there is a comprehensive urban infrastructure: shops, restaurants, kindergartens, a rooftop swimming pool, a public park, home for the elderly and direct access to two U-Bahn stations etc.
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The Gänsehäufel
The approx. 150 year old waterside bathing facility, converted in the 1940s, is situated on an island on the Alte Donau. The architects Max Fellerer and Eugen Wörle have created an almost village-like environment, in the centre of which stands a spiral clock tower made of concrete. There are numerous bathing cabins (Kabanen) throughout the grounds that can be leased on the same basis as allotments. The Gänsehäufel has a total surface area of 330,000 square metres and is visited in the high season by 30,000 people per day.
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© Leyla Jafarmadar
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