Gasometers or gasholders-huge storage containers for the gas used in heating and cooking-were built in many cities during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, when gas was a commercial byproduct of coal mining, steelmaking, and other industrial processes. Today, many of the old gasometers have been replaced by pipelines and tank farms, but a few are being adapted to new uses. Among the latter are four 102-year-old gasholders in the Vienna's Simmering district, which have been reborn as a residential and commercial development, named ?Gasometer-Town.?
G-town's gasometers date back to 1896, when Viennese authorities decided it was time to invest in large-scale gas and electric utilities. In just three years, the city built Europe's largest gas plant having the four gasometers and laid more than 500 km of gas lines.
This multi use project reused the external facades of the four gasometers as they are not just the symbol of Simmering, but also the whole city silhouette of Vienna. They are true monuments and landmarks in the cityscape. Therefore total demolition of the buildings was avoided and less demolition waste was generated.
The restoration work showed that the external facades were in poor conditions. The top sections of the brick piers needed to be taken down and rebuilt. Reuse of the original material from the brick piers was not possible as the mortar which had been used was harder than the bricks.
Four architects won the competition in 1995, Jean Nouvel, Coop Himmelb (l)au, Manfred Wehdorn and Wilhelm Holzbauer, with a different interpretation of each gasometer. Jean Nouvel has created a large indoor plaza with a translucent roof playing with reflections, refractions and transparencies of the old and the new. Coop Himmelb (l)au added a new 22 storey building to the existing one. Manfred Wehdorn created an indoor garden and an eco-friendly designed terraced structure. Wilhelm Holzbauer occupied the center of the existing building with lift and stairs, from which three compact sections were divided by indoor gardens penetrating the perimeter of the existing building.
Gasometer City is built in a sort of shopping mall construction in which straight stretches - the walkways outside the gasometers - alternate with covered plazas constructed inside the buildings. The functional distribution involving a mixture of different uses privileges commercial space on the ground floor, of course, with offices and residential units on the upper floors.
This unusual project has been highly successful with almost all the units in Gasometer City are already occupied, and the presence of different functions in the same area means that the development is busy both day and night. The centrality of its location close to the Prater and the unusual solution make the development attractive to young people, prevalently from a middle to high economic and cultural background, who are attracted by the seduction of a self-sufficient space which, while somewhat reminiscent of a big shopping mall, is ennobled by the attraction of industrial archaeology and the prestige of some of the biggest names in international architecture today.
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