A Space for the Future - Library Buildings in the 21st Century
Helsinki, Finland, June 2 - 3, 2002

The new Hauptbibliothek Wien / Main City Library Vienna
By Alfred Pfoser, director of the Büchereien Wien (City Library Vienna)

Urban Intervention
Since the nineties the “Gürtel”, the huge circular traffic artery of the city, has received the highest degree of attention in terms of town planning and discourse about City politics. In 1995 the City’s planning councillor Hannes Swoboda called the “Gürtel” an “open wound in the city”. A three-lane road on each side of the former “Stadtbahn” (Vienna city train), nowadays the U6 (subway line), has been converting the “Gürtel” into an urban highway. About a 100.000 cars are using the “Gürtel” daily, occupying the formerly magnificent avenue completely and separating the interior districts from the outer ones.
In order to point out the architectural beauty of the former “Stadtbahn” (opened 1898) all the stations of the U-Bahn (subway) have been redeveloped completely in the course of the adjustment. The prospering gastronomy scene slowly discovered the zone on the “Gürtel” as an interesting location. The newly built cycle path was another infrastructure measure bringing new sections of the population to the “Gürtel”. In the area of tension between “slum-like” development and revival the “Gürtel” became the special object of town planning and redevelopment. The “Gürtel-Plus” project, supported by the City and promoted by the EU brought the “Gürtel” into the centre of public attention.

Location and architecture
In its dimensions the Urban-Loritz-Platz (since 1999 with the newly set up tent roof) covers a lot of space; at the North side is a subway station, two tramlines have their terminals here as well as their turning points, another two tramlines cross the square. A highly frequented bus line stops at the station Burggasse, a building that is under preservation order. About 30.000 people are getting in and out of trains here on a daily basis.
The comments of the jury, why Ernst Mayr’s model of a “staircase library” had won the first prize, were the following: “a generously dimensioned flight of steps could form a casual urban meeting point, giving the building its special and unmistakable characteristics. Incorporating the main entrances to the library and to the subway on two levels, it leads from the Urban-Loritz-Platz to a terrace on the roof, with the library-Café in the form of a rotunda on top of it. The facades along the noisy lanes of the Gürtel are mostly covered, the building is set over the open shaft of the subway station Burggasse-Stadthalle, providing the view across the Gürtel and out of the station. Inside are large, quiet library halls whose contemplative character is underlined by a very refined light coming down from the ceiling."

The content
The Main City Library Vienna, into which the central administration of the libraries in Vienna will be integrated, covers 6.085 square meters of net usable floor space and is a multi-structured multimedia open-shelf library containing 300.000 media, study space and comfortable seating corners for 150 people, 130 PCs for public use (EDP-work stations, OPACs, Internet, data banks, computing wo