In Vienna, there is now life far beyond the Ring Road. And even behind the Danube, thanks to the emergence of a new business district on the north bank of the river that borders the Austrian capital.
For Vienna Donau-City - Vienna DC for those in a hurry - the story begins with a fiasco: that of the 1995 Universal Exhibition project, for which a complex organisation had been planned combining the two capitals of the 'double crown' in the late Habsburg Empire, Vienna and Budapest. The operation quickly collapsed, but it did have the merit of focusing attention on the freed-up land north of the river, from which only the rounded curves of UNO City stood out. The result was the rapid development of the country's largest real estate project, covering 18 hectares, and the concept of a mixed zone combining housing and innovative business buildings, symbolised by the Tech Gate technology park, one of Vienna DC's major developments.
Today, 7,500 people live and work in Donau-City, particularly around the major companies that have chosen to set up in this dynamic area, such as IBM, Sanofi-Aventis, Unysis, General Electrics and Strabag, the Austrian leader in the construction industry. The list goes on, as Vienna DC remains a district in the making, where every few years we celebrate the birth of a new glass and steel child: the Andromeda Tower (1998), the Ares Tower (2001), the Saturn Tower (2004) and the Tech Gate Vienna Tower (2006). And the most impressive is yet to come: according to a masterplan drawn up by Dominique Perrault, we should soon see two towers rise from the ground under the name DC Tower, one of them reaching a height of 220 metres, something never seen before in Austria. This will further raise the profile of a district that is shaping the economic future of a city that the enlargement of the European Union has put back at the centre of the continent.
