Yale School of Architecture

Professor Brigitte Shim

Nominated for Feldman Prize

The Vienna Skating Club has long been part of Viennese society, and what was once held up as a spectacle and heralded for its ability to bring people together in communal activity has become suppressed and hidden behind closed walls.  The current ice rinks found in Vienna are in a social black-hole abutting the Intercontinental Hotel and the Vienna Konzerthaus but engaging neither and remaining hidden from the street.  This project sets out to reimagine the ice-skating rink as seamlessly integrated into the public realm.  It refigures the site as one large sheet of ice that is both visibly and physically accessible to everyone.  Much like the Dutch Painter Hendrick Avercamp’s paintings depict, society would occur on the ice blurring the distinction between public plaza and ice rink.  This new free space allows for a programmatic mixing that brings a multitude of different groups together inhabiting a frozen tabula rasa.  Planes of solid resplendent and luxurious materials then start to shape spaces for specific and frame views while retaining the visual transparency across the site.  The hotel rooms and apartments that make up the private functions associated with the project are suspended above the ice in travertine blocks alluding to the surrounding white buildings that make up Vienna’s fabric.  These blocks in turn shape larger public moves referencing both the adjacent Stadtpark and Beethovenplatz and framing views out to each.  The horizontally free public space of the ice rink makes its way up through large atriums in these blocks spilling out public space vertically allowing the public to inhabit the voids.