Finland comes to Alsergrund

“And everywhere I was surrounded and delighted and enveloped by the grace of Vienna, and all too soon my Vienna days were over,” Hermann Hesse once wrote. This will no doubt also be the case for visitors to VIENNA DESIGN WEEK, since the city’s already rich offering is soon to be supplemented once again by that of the festival. Austria’s biggest design festival will run from September 27 to October 6 and will feature a colorful range of exhibitions, product presentations, workshops, projects, talks and more. In addition, this year too there will be a number of tours to bring visitors closer to design and its numerous facets. In what is already the 13th edition of the festival, visitors can look forward to the exclusive presentation of national and international creativity. Alongside this, experimental approaches in architecture and numerous forms of design can be explored, with the aim being to foster open debate.

This year’s focus area of the festival, which is once again making Vienna a “City Full of Design”, is Alsergrund, the ninth district of Vienna. It is here that the new Althan quarter is currently taking shape on the site of the Franz Josef railway station, the biggest urban development project within the ring road. Thanks to this year’s Location Partners 6B47 Real Estate Investors AG, the building that currently exists directly over the station is to be made accessible to the public for the first time as part of VIENNA DESIGN WEEK. In addition, Finland will appear as guest nation – in the exhibition “Wild at Heart” in the festival center at Julius-Tandler-Platz 3, designer Tero Kuitunen acts as curator, presenting some most likely less well-known, non-conformist sides of the Finnish design scene.