Austrian Filmmuseum inside/out

Vienna, Austria

Photo © Hertha Hurnaus

Museums + Galleries

Architects: GABU Heindl Architecture

Location: Augustinerstrasse 1, 1010 Vienna, Austria
Year: 2008
Client: Burghauptmannschaft Österreich and the Austrian Filmmuseum
Team: GABU Heindl Architektur: Gabu Heindl, Aram Münster, Andreas Pfusterer, Philipp Müllner, Daniel Ehrl

The Austrian Film Museum is famous for its „Invisible Cinema“, in which the physical space of the auditorium disappears into the black in favour of the projection to be the only space of experience in this movie theatre. The new construction for the Austrian Film Museum works complementary to the „Invisible Cinema“: Along the facade of the Albertina, which before was like an empty screen in front of the hidden cinema, the space behind the facade – the space of the cinema – is made visible. New entrances and window openings project the bar and the foyer of the film museum into the outside and play upon the motif of the blackness of the projection space proper. Seen from the users´ point of view, the modification opens the bar of the film museum to the outside, connects it as a social space to the urban surrounding. The alchoves in the depth of the Albertina´s plinth wall have been redesigned to now serve as comfortable zones for face-to-face communication, while the parapets of the windows – windows that open vertically – act as tables for the inside and bar counters from the outside. Being inside/outside at the same time marks the entire reconstruction, since all the new spaces are neither inside the building nor outside of it, but literally within the wall itself: they are openings in the two-and-a-half metre thick plinth of the Albertina. A little like cinema itself, they are opportunities to place oneself right where interior and exterior meet.