Parkquartier. Hotel & Ice Rink

Under the tutorship of Umberto Napolitano and Maxime Enrico (LAN Paris), we embarked on a semester-long project aiming to understand and capture the essence of Viennese urbanity within the redevelopment of one of the most iconic modernist structures the city has to offer: the Intercontinental Hotel. This began with an urban analysis of public space, networks, city blocks, buildings and more, all in an effort to better understand the key characteristics of the space we were to reshape.

Our chosen task became the documentation of existing parks, squares and other areas of communal activity and, by establishing a basic typology, sought to define them by their historical, geographical and compositional values in order for the knowledge attained through this exercise to be applied to our project.

Based on a volumetric, rationalist approach, our proposal focuses on the space in between, and tries to confront the monumentality of an historic building through means of preservation, in order to redefine what is already there.