Historical Urban Landscape by Gábor Sonkoly

Author:Gábor Sonkoly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The First Threat: The Wien-Mitte Project and Its Consequences

The status of the Wien-Mitte Project 59 as a precedent stems from a coincidence: it was one of the numerous high-rise developments which received building permits immediately after the World Heritage nomination of Vienna’s Historic Centre. The one-and-a-half-year-long crisis, accompanied by the real threat of being delisted from the World Heritage List, was a short interval in the history of the reconstruction of the Wien-Mitte Railway Station, which took more than 20 years between 1991, the year of the first winning proposal of the Ortner & Ortner Architectural Studio, and the completion of the same architectural office’s second winning project between 2007 and 2013. The call for tenders to refurbish the railway station, which played an essential role in the resolution of the World Heritage conflict in 2003, was only a brief episode in this long history. It was not won by Ortner & Ortner, but by another Viennese studio, whose plans were never implemented because of financial difficulties. 60 This shows that the Wien-Mitte conflict did not lead to a final solution for the development project; it merely indicated the limits of development which should be respected.

The Historic Centre and the railway station did not constitute a unit prior to this conflict. The history of the Wien-Mitte Project and that of the Historic Centre are linked together by the fact that the station is included in the buffer zone of the World Heritage Site and by the simultaneity of their respective official approvals. The subsequent short crisis lasted less than two years, between 2001 and 2003. However, it not only resulted in the reinterpretation of the World Heritage and its surroundings—without a tangible solution for the reconstruction of the railway station—but also contributed to the organization of the Vienna Conference in 2005. At the peak of the crisis in 2002, the UNESCO WHC showed itself to be very keen to settle the status of this new site. An ICOMOS Mission arrived in March, and in May a WHC Mission—headed by Francesco Bandarin, the dynamic president elected one and a half years earlier—thoroughly investigated the management of the critical project. In addition to this, the forthcoming WHC Session happened to be in Budapest, not far away, which made the Viennese case even more noteworthy. In June, the decision of this session included a potential delisting of the Historic Centre if the Wien-Mitte Project was not settled properly.

The crisis between the city and the WHC affected the City Council too. Between 2000 and 2015, the topic of the Vienna World Heritage appears most frequently in the Minutes of the City Council in 2002; this happened to be the year when a snap election was held in November, which raised its political sensitivity even higher. In the first half of the year, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) addressed two letters about the Wien-Mitte conflict to Rudolf Schicker, Councilor for Urban Development and Transport. 61 The first letter, sent in February, was technical in

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