Sustainable City North West City | Coop Himmelb(l)au

In 2008, the municipality of Vienna organised for the terrain of the former Northwest Railway Station a urban masterplanning competition, to which was invited. The intention of our design is the development of an urban zone that is based on optimized energetic and sustainable ecological parameters. There is the possibility to integrate systems of regional as well as national structures and functions. The aim was both the integration of common typologies and the establishment of new contemporary interactions and penetrations of synchronous operations of the urban everyday life. The heterogeneous living environment of a high tech society, where social networks and the new media are thriving, requires complex decentralized user scenarios which respond to the increasingly diversifying lifestyles of the urban population. A low impact on natural resources like space and energy, as well as respect for the individual time management of inhabitants are best integrated in the “compact city” concept, which proposes the “city of short distances”. Habitation and work, recreation, culture or other activities in the community are not actually lived in separate environments; they are rather an integral part of our complex way of life, which implies that all sections of the population have equal access to the institutions and facilities of the society. Hence an integrative approach was chosen for the terrain of the former North-West-Railway Station, which proposed to overlay and entangle the building structures with the large central open space, and to create a decentralised network of public, private and infrastructural functions. The guiding principles of integration and communication, as well as independence and autonomy of the development resulted in quality features like a wide-ranging spectrum of differentiated public spaces, urban squares at the site’s periphery and near-natural expanses in the center, permeability of the area for public transport, cyclists and pedestrians, and considerable reduction of individual motorized traffic.