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The architecture of the new Prater Museum
Michael Wallraff - 2024
Diversity at all levels of experience
A museum in the middle of the Wurstelprater? That's also an architectural challenge. Not only because the Prater is visually loud and the view of the Giant Ferris Wheel must remain unobstructed. The architect's thoughts on a built ‘magic box’.
The Pratermuseum is a small museum in the middle of the Wurstelprater and presents the cultural and natural history not only of the amusement park, but also of the entire heterogeneous Prater area in the east of Vienna, between the city centre and the Danube.
Fortunately, the project could be realised right in the heart of the amusement park, in other words right in the middle of the exhibition itself. What a bizarre neighbourhood for a museum between autodromes, gambling halls and ghost trains and right next to the Ferris wheel! In any case, the conventional urban planning parameters of an architectural design cannot apply here: What do terms such as context, ensemble, appropriateness, interaction, spatial order, organisation, hierarchy of spaces count for in the Wurstelprater? And how should our design respond to the extremely heterogeneous, fleeting, sensationalist environment? Top everything around it and become even more garish, self-confident, shrill and loud? Or seriously reduce it to the concept of a museum and implement high culture in the world of amusing trash?
The starting point for our design was initially the classic question of accessibility, the entrance situation of the museum. After all, it was to be a museum ‘for everyone’, meaning easy to find, easy to reach and linked to the public space as easily as possible. Although the small site is located in a closed development, it is cut through the block and has two fronts, one facing the ‘Straße des Ersten Mai’, the main pedestrian axis of the amusement park, and one facing the Giant Ferris Wheel, the main attraction there. Here, the principle of 'both-and', which Robert Venturi postulated as an essential quality of architecture as early as 1966,1 proved to be a good guiding principle, which was to accompany us again and again in the further design: The museum naturally had to have two - equally important - entrances! However, this also made it clear that there could be no single-storey solution, as originally envisaged, on this small building site. So let's go up, let's go vertical! And that was exactly my topic, as I have been working with vertical public spaces for years. However, the Vienna Municipal Department for Architecture and Urban Design stipulated that the view of the Ferris wheel could not be obstructed. So without further ado, we cut out this view of the Giant Ferris Wheel in the form of a cone from the high building volume - the result was a somewhat peculiar, relatively massive, even striking building sculpture for the small size of the project. But peculiarity is perhaps not so unsuitable for the Prater, and so a contextuality, a very direct reference to the Giant Ferris Wheel, emerged almost by chance: the shape of the museum as an imprint of the view of the Giant Ferris Wheel. And this special connection is more than legitimate, as the Giant Ferris Wheel is in all probability the most permanent, long-lasting and monumental urban reference at this location.
Pratermuseum sectional drawing
© Michael Wallraff ZT GmbH
The museum as a vessel
Admittedly: Terms such as form or architectural sculpture are rather uncool, indeed often frowned upon, in the current architectural debate, as the focus is currently more on optimisation of all kinds, functionality, energy and the like. Despite their undisputed relevance, we must not lose sight of the semantics and narrative potential of architectural design. So let's come back to our form: This quickly led us to the concept of the vessel - it is hard to imagine a vessel without form - and a vessel seemed to us a very beautiful and fitting metaphor for the space in which a very heterogeneous cultural-historical collection is to be housed and displayed. A museum as a vessel also captures a state that suggests a division between inside and outside, which therefore requires not only going in, entering, but also putting in, filling and selecting - two basic principles of a curatorial approach.
Pratermuseum with Ferris wheel seen from the "Straße des Ersten Mai"
© Hertha Hurnaus
In terms of the vertical form - which can be experienced from inside and outside - it was also important to us to set the building volume slightly back from both street fronts, on the one hand to emphasise the verticality through the smaller footprint, and on the other to generate a kind of forecourt on both sides, a transitional space between the street/square and the foyer, a further transitional space to the actual exhibition. From there, we designed an internal path through the vessel, in which the respective views and the way and sequence in which different spatial forms are perceived were at the centre of our considerations.
Exterior view "Eduard-Lang-Weg"
© Hertha Hurnaus
Instead of describing or even explaining our design in more detail here - the best way to understand it is to visit it yourself - I would like to set out a few basic thoughts on our Prater architecture and return to the narrative moment, because this is often misunderstood and therefore rejected. Our built environment does not have to tell stories in a literary sense - it tells the story of the life that takes place in it. Nevertheless, we should be aware of the meaning - hints as well as possible interpretations - of the built space. If it is not completely simple, in other words unambiguous, but multifaceted, perhaps even contradictory and in any case readable in different ways, something like a narrative is automatically created in the visitor's mind and, in the best case, poetry as well. And in the case of this museum in particular, it is primarily about telling history through stories. The design of the museum and the exhibition are important means of creating a dramaturgy. I quote Robert Venturi again: ‘The narrative moment is just as rare in recent architecture as the element with more than one function. If the ambiguity of the latter is resented, the narrative moment fails in the cult of ‘less-is-more’ of modern orthodox architecture.‘2 When Venturi repeatedly returns to systems of order and their disruption, this seems somewhat outdated to us today, because in the digital age we are dealing with completely different hierarchies, simultaneities and contradictions. The social response to the dissolution of many rules believed to be inherent to the structure and the resulting excessive demands are mostly media simplifications and generalisations. But one thing is clear: architecture cannot organise the contradictions of life, it can only continue them, perhaps make them tangible and place them in new sensual, narrative or functional relationships to one another. Every order that we construct immediately dissolves again.
Foyer
© Klaus Pichler
In the specific case of the Pratermuseum, the organisation initially means: the exhibition with good museum conditions at the top, the semi-public threshold space below, the passage to the city, at the very top on the roof the building technology etc. And yet the exhibition begins at the bottom (with a wall-filling panoramic drawing by Olaf Osten), and there is also an exchange with the city at the top (through a crescent-shaped window slit to the Giant Ferris Wheel and a visitor balcony, for example). Technology runs through all floors anyway and is also the theme of the Prater and thus the content of the exhibition: city, Prater, museum and exhibition interweave. Only through the lost order does order become visible and the exhibition comprehensible. Or, as Venturi writes: ‘A building without any imperfect detail cannot have a perfect one, because only the contrast emphasises the meaning.’3 And irritations, anomalies and imponderables are also the substance from which the Wurstelprater itself seems to be built. A Prater museum is a large magic box - full of strange things, spatial experiences, contradictions and colourful stories. An orderly jumble of images, objects, films, texts, stairs, views, insights, touches, fragments and surprises.
Playful yet pragmatic, diverse yet efficient, sensual yet modern, ecological yet elegant: is that even possible? Come and have a look!
