Vienna Design Week at Twenty: Lightness Inside Harry Glück's Tower
Cities tend to discover their buildings twice. The first time is when they are new and the second is when they fall empty, and it is often in the interval between use and reuse that a building is looked at properly. Design festivals have learnt to work in that interval. They move into offices, factories and former shops for a few days, and visitors walk through spaces that were never meant for them, noticing the stairwells, the carpets and the views that the people who once worked there had long stopped seeing.
Vienna Design Week has made such interim use part of its method. For its 20th edition, running until 4 October, it has taken over the office tower at Hietzinger Kai 101, beside the Unter St. Veit underground station. The building was designed by Harry Glück and built between 1974 and 1976 as the headquarters of the insurance company Allianz. Across its nine storeys the festival now uses the former offices as well as the rooms that tell of the life around them: the old cafeteria with its terrace and garden, a vehicle registration point, a kindergarten and the bowling alleys in the basement. The building has been made available by the family company Kollitsch Invest, and admission is free. One contributor to the programme calls it the blue giant of Hietzinger Kai.
The choice of architect is not incidental. Born in Vienna in 1925, Glück first studied stage design and direction at the Max Reinhardt Seminar before turning to architecture, which he completed at the Vienna University of Technology in 1960. He became one of the defining figures of Viennese social housing, and over five decades realised some 18,000 flats, 16,000 of them in Vienna. His best known work is the Wohnpark Alterlaa in the 23rd district, completed between 1976 and 1985 for around 10,000 residents, with swimming pools on its roofs that also serve as reservoirs for firefighting. His motto, to live like the rich, also for the poor, described an architecture that measured itself by the daily comfort of the people inside it. The office tower on Hietzinger Kai belongs to the same years as Alterlaa, and something of the stage designer remains in both: a sense that a building is also a setting for ordinary life to take place in.
The festival itself began with a similar interest in how things are made and used. In 2006 its founders, Lilli Hollein, Tulga Beyerle and Thomas Geisler, organised a project called Passionswege, which paired designers with Viennese workshops and manufacturers. A year later it became the foundation of Vienna Design Week, and Passionswege remains one of its central formats. Twenty years on, the festival counts more than 40,000 visitors to around 200 events a year, yet it has kept the character of a city walk rather than a trade fair. As with Currents in Berlin or Alcova in Milan, the place is part of what is being shown.
Inside the tower, the most concentrated statement of the anniversary is FOKUS, the group exhibition format the festival launched in 2022. For its fifth edition, the Swiss guest curator Connie Hüsser has chosen 36 international positions under the title The Essence of Lightness. The scenography is by the costume and set designer Kathrin Kemp, working with Twist, a textile by Bertjan Pot for Maharam. The festival describes Hüsser's interest as one in objects that float rather than dominate, that appear permeable rather than monumental, and that make fragility, movement and tension visible.
Lightness means being present in the here and now.
Lightness has a longer intellectual history than its easy associations suggest. When Italo Calvino prepared his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for Harvard, to be delivered in the autumn of 1985, he placed it first among the qualities he wished to carry into the next millennium. Calvino died before he could give the lectures, and they were published as Six Memos for the Next Millennium. His lightness was not a lack of weight but a way of handling it, a precision that lets a thing appear effortless. In design the idea has a material side. Wire, paper, thin sheet metal and fabric are chosen not because they are weak but because they carry load through form: a mesh is stiff because of its geometry, a folded sheet because of its crease, a paper shade because it is stretched over a frame.
Several works in the exhibition follow that logic. Yoomin Sun works with fine wire mesh, bent into open shapes through which the room remains visible. Adrian Bursell, known for handmade lamps in paper, shows a pendant light reduced to a single curved plane that glows along its edge. Rein Reitsma presents a table light whose translucent ribbed body is held together with simple ties, its construction left in view. None of these pieces hides how it stands up.
The same principle has long been at home in ordinary rooms. The paper lantern is perhaps its most familiar form, and a shade such as HAY's Paper Shade shows how little material is needed to change the quality of light in a room. A candleholder bent from wire works in a similar way, holding its flame in a drawing rather than a mass.
There is a quiet irony in showing all of this in a building of concrete, glass and cladding, raised in the 1970s for an insurer, an institution whose business is to guard against the unexpected. The tower was built to last and to reassure. The objects inside it are built to hover, to let light pass and to be moved. Placed together for ten days, each makes the other easier to read.
When the festival closes on 4 October, the plinths will be packed and the tower will return to waiting for its next use. For a short time it will have been a stage again, which is perhaps what its architect intended all along.
Photography: Christoph Wimmer/Studio Sirene (cover), eSeL.at/Joanna Pianka. Images: Courtesy of Vienna Design Week, Yoomin Sun, Adrian Bursell and Rein Reitsma
