Design Studio Airport City Vienna

Marc Augé regards airports as “non-places” – places of the placeless that enjoy no individual identity, have no shared past and create no social relationships. These are transit spaces, where the focus is on the functional. And their urban surroundings are also non-places that we are now looking to upgrade in architectural and spatial terms.
 
Airport City Vienna is the piece of city next to the airport that is being transformed from a threshold space into a new urban centre. The objective of the project is to develop places and spaces that offer potential opportunities for exchange and communication. Another objective of the process is to reinvent (post-) public space and to overturn habitual ways of thinking. We will use the example of Airport City to investigate whether the private space of Flughafen Wien AG is capable of opening up this discussion.
“Airport City. Spatial Interventions” is seeking strategies for focussing on people and their needs. Spatial, architectural and landscape interventions should penetrate and reinterpret the boundary between public and private space. We will use the existing spaces and facilities as the starting point for the development of a range of new spaces that encourage a sense of community and address the needs of the people in Airport City, return greenery to the city and create liveable places. In the course of the project, the students will develop and install performative, spatial and architectural interventions at Airport City and present these for discussion on the site. The experiences and impacts of these performative interventions on the space will then be retrospectively incorporated and documented in the projects.
 
Location
Airport City Vienna is located at the heart of Vienna International Airport and offers office space in the immediate vicinity of the terminal, the Cargo Center Vienna logistics and freight handling centre and the future east & west zones. A new economic hub covering a total of 360,000 m2 is being created. 230 companies with a total of over 20,000 employees are currently located at the airport. By 2025, 1,400 hotel rooms will be available.
 
Hence, Airport City Vienna is standing on the threshold of huge changes. Austria’s Eastern Region and the Vienna Airport Region are benefitting from these changes due to their locational qualities and outstanding infrastructure. No longer just the headquarters of Vienna International Airport, Airport City Vienna has developed into an attractive office and administrative location. The pandemic, which brought air traffic to a standstill, played a key role in demonstrating the importance of the Airport City office location as a stabilising factor.
 
Objective
People come together at the airport for many different reasons. Some are departing or arriving. Others remain, work and go home before returning again. These flows occur at different speeds and demand different ways of using the public realm. People need exchange, communication and community. Architecture creates the parameters for supporting this community. Such places are often defined functionally – meeting rooms, rest areas and canteens. But we need far more than these monofunctional spaces. We need places in which we can meet each other and spend time together. The threshold between external and internal spaces is particularly significant in this context, because this determines whether we feel welcome or would rather remain outside, whether we define ourselves as part of society and feel comfortable in the public realm. Such spaces are the “airfield” for all passers-by, the people who work in Airport City Vienna and those who only linger there awhile. We are seeking spatial concepts that will give Airport City Vienna a sustainable form and ensure that people enjoy being there rather than just seeing it as a place of transit.

Presentation