Vienna Airport Tower

Spot landing

The expansion of Vienna International Airport also required the construction of a new air traffic control centre with a control tower. In 2002, a general planning competition was held for this purpose, which was won by ARGE Zechner-Lorenz with an impressive design by Martin Zechner.

The approx. 108 m high tower is divided into a base, a central zone with membrane covering and a tower head. The six-storey base zone accommodates air traffic control facilities and takes up the alignments of the orthogonal street grid.

The tower head is rotated by approx. 45 degrees to the base in order to ensure optimum visual relations with the runways. The central area is covered with a translucent skin that serves as a projection surface for multimedia content (info, advertising, art, etc.) and whose profile continuously deforms from the base geometry to the head geometry. The main structure consists entirely of reinforced concrete, with the tower shaft, which is over 100 m high, in the form of a circular concrete tube with a wall thickness of a constant 45 cm and a diameter of around 10 m, and was constructed using the sliding construction method. The load-bearing structure of the floor levels of the base consists of loosely reinforced flat slabs with a thickness of 30 cm and round columns with a diameter of 30 to 50 cm.