In the wilderness: a very small building brings a sense of place, humanity and gentleness to the harsh and absurd urban landscapes of Vienna's business satellite

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2002 by Peter Davey

Donau City, east across the Danube and the Donaukanal from the old city of Vienna, is intended to relieve some of the pressures on the traditional centre, in the way that La Defense has clearly saved Paris from some of the more horrid attentions of twentieth-century developers. But Donau City is even more crass than La Defense. At least in the French version, the vulgar caperings of coarse commercial buildings are given some degree of order by the huge formal space they enclose, and by the visual dominance of poor von Spreckelsen's Grand Arche (AR August 1989). Donau City has no civic sense at all. It is an incoherent jumble of pathetic but sinister and scaleless object-buildings feebly gesturing at each other over a civil engineer's lunch of writhing roads and a suburban railway. Pedestrians are compelled to use vacuous, shelterless walkways without local incident or relief. It could not be more different from the complex gradations of place and scale in Vienna itself. Donau City was generated by 1960s and 7 0s planning at its worst.

In the middle of this dreadful place is one small moment of tranquility, calm and dignity. Heinz Tesar's church of Christus Hoffnung der Welt (Christ the Hope of the World) is, at first sight, an exercise in minimalism and restraint. In certain lights, its dark chromium (stainless) steel seems to make the building an almost black cuboid. But with even a little bit of sunshine, it changes as you walk round from deep purple to shimmering silver. A repetitive grid of bolts made of ordinary stainless steel shows how the dark steel plates are fixed, pays homage to Wagner's famous aluminium bolt heads at the Postsparkasse in the proper city over the river, and sets up a small-scale detailed pattern that mediates between that of the plates and the circular piercings that bring daylight to the interior. The skin is taut and smooth. Each corner of the square plan is eroded into a reverse angle, intended to make the block less formidable from outside, and permitting more light to enter.

Inside, the atmosphere is almost totally different from the severe external presence. Pale birch panelling on walls and ceiling is echoed in the pews, giving the whole place a gentle, luminous warmth, which changes in intensity and emphasis with the weather and time of day. The portholes, large and small, might be expected to generate glare, but rarely do because they are so numerous and have deep reveals, funnelled and sometimes inclined, so surrounding each circular source of light with diffused luminance. Behind the almost black syenite altar, rough-hewn in contrast to the smooth birch, is a gently emphasized circle in the panelling, pierced in only one place, at the crux of the quietly incised cross to mark the axis from congregation to altar to priest to the emblem of Christ.

Some have suggested that the space is in the Baroque tradition,* and so it clearly is. But this is a Baroque for our times, a Catholic space that is both democratic and numinous. There are problems. Why did the lantern over the altar have to be a squirm? Why on earth are the internal porches curved lean-tos, in contradiction to the calm geometry? Why the re-entrant eroding of the external corners, which makes the form less clear than it might have been? But these difficulties are trivial compared to the authority of the place. This little building, gentle yet powerful, eloquent of the pierced body of Christ and at the same time a lighthouse of His teachings, dwarfs the surrounding slimy monsters.

* Notably Boyken, Immo: Heinz Tesar, Christus Hoffnung der Welt Wien, Edition Axel Menges, Stuttgart. 2002. A detailed comparative study of the church with text in both German and English.

Architect

Heinz Tesar with Marc Tesar

Project team

Oliver Aschenbrenner, Achim Bilger, Urs Geiger, Silvia Prager. Heidi Schatzl, Franz Steinberger, Susanne Veit

Photographs

Christian Richters