Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien Mensa
Invited Competition, First Place
Vienna, Austria
University Dining Hall
Completion: October 2013
The dining hall for the new Vienna University of Economics and Business occupies a large, ground floor space in the Hörsaalzentrum - a corten steel clad building that houses the main lecture halls and seminar rooms. Although connected to the life of the campus, the Mensa reads as a separate environment, a place where students can find respite from their academic activities. To accentuate the break from the classroom and lecture hall, the Mensa references the natural world outside the newly minted campus. Nature is interpreted as an opportunity to create the perception of environmental change. Nearly all of the opaque walls in the space are clad floor to ceiling in glass panels with a printed panorama of an abstracted forest landscape. The panorama was commissioned to the Austrian artist Markus Leitsch, who rendered an image recognizable as a forest yet strangely suspended between graphic and realistic states. The glass panels are back-lighted with programmed LED strips that change in tone and intensity during the course of the day, reflecting changes in daylight and seasonal conditions. A student that enters the Mensa in the morning will encounter a different environment in the afternoon. The atmospheric changes are not perceptible over the course of minutes but over the course of hours. To emphasize the light qualities of the wall paneling, the ceiling, columns, and floor surfaces are black, gray, and unadorned. The dining area is divided into four zones, each characterized by a separate seating type that corresponds to particular uses and lighting conditions. All furnishing in the hall is made of solid wood stained in different tones. The meal stations, on the other hand, are all concentrated in a curved volume clad in anodized aluminum panels. The volume operates like a large market stall with each meal station having a separate opening. When the stations are not in use, large mechanical panels slide over the openings creating a taut metallic object. The Mensa is fully digitized and paperless. Students use their ID cards to pay at each of the meal counters. The flexibility of the payment system allows for a space that is absent of long lines and enclosed serving areas. Students are free to move at will from station to station and have a choice of dining areas to populate, while being surrounded by a space that is constantly shifting and changing its atmospheric qualities.
Invited Competition
Location: Vienna, Austria
Principal use: University Dining Hall
Total floor area: 2,000 m2
Number of stories: 1
Design team: Chieh-shu Tzou, Gregorio S. Lubroth, Anna Psenicka
Art Consultant: Markus Leitsch
Photos by Stefan Zenzmaier