Innsbruck City Hall
By Katrin Heiss

Historical background
In 1358 Innsbruck became the first town in the Tyrol to have its own city hall. The old City Hall was a merchant’s house situated right in the old town of Innsbruck. But lack of space soon made it necessary for the town administration to start looking for more room.

On the occasion of Emperor Franz Joseph’s pending golden jubilee, the wholesaler Leonhard Lang decided to present his house, a former hotel in the Maria-Theresien-Straße, to the people of Innsbruck for use as a city hall. During the second world war, bombs completely destroyed the central section of the building in the main street of Innsbruck and between 1947 and 1948 large parts of the City Hall were rebuilt.  

In 1983 a competition for the reconstruction and conversion of the City Hall was announced but the plans were postponed until 1994 when a consortium of both city government and private investors decided to hold an international architectural competition for the reconstruction and extension of the City Hall.

The clear winner was the French star architect Dominique Perrault. In partnership with the Munich-based architects Reichert-Pranschke-Maluche and the Tyrolean planning company Achammer, Tritthart & Partner (ATP) Perrault’s competition project was fully able to mature and the reconstruction of the City Hall began in early 2000.

After a decade-long development process the new City Hall and the City Hall Galleries were opened in 2002 and since then the complex has been a major attraction at the very heart of Innsbruck.

A new approach
Dominique Perrault once mentioned that it was the first time that he had been confronted with such an unusual situation. On the one hand, there was the municipal authority making the land available, and on the other, there was an investor consortium of banks and business people who wanted to add a shopping mall and a hotel to the existing building. The “private public partnership”, however, turned out to be a great success and the close interaction between public and private sectors exceeded all expectations.

The City Hall of Innsbruck is shared by several private and public investors and different functions are housed within one large urban block. The entrance to the town hall can be found directly at the entrance to the Rathaus Galerien shopping mall.

Art and nature
Two features are to be found throughout the new City Hall – art and nature. The city administration has placed great emphasis on the inclusion of art and the creation of green space.

A total of thirteen projects concentrated in the City Hall of Innsbruck were realised by Austrian and international artists. The core pieces of the project, due to their size and their location in key areas of the architectural composition, consist of the glass roof for the courtyard by Daniel Buren and the glass façade of the tower by Peter Kogler. From the new glazed City Hall tower one can enjoy a spectacular view of the surrounding mountains.

A green carpet was laid over the entire complex to provide a replacement for the lost green space. The inner court of the City Hall was designed in green and all the roofs were given roof gardens. The close interaction between art and nature has proved to be a highlight for both locals and tourists, and the combination of contemporary aestheticism and functionalism has set a new standard for Innsbruck’s urban architecture.