5 Very Ugly Places

Friedensreich Hundertwasser is a famous Austrian artist who is known for his colourful paintings and objects. He didn’t like straight lines, and there are none in his Hunderwasser Kunsthaus in Vienna. In 1987 he decorated the waste incineration plant with his art. Bizarre!

It’s as if a UFO landed here. The building of the former university of economics dates from the eighties. When students moved in in 1982 the university was already too small. Nowadays it is located on a brand-new WU-campus. The city is currently thinking about what to do with the building.

This resembles a postmodern castle, with its many different colours and towers that form an octagon. When the architect Peter Czernin started building it in 1981, the building was considered state of the art. But nowadays eighties architecture has very few fans. Who knows, maybe the eighties will experience a revival, like in fashion.

These anti-aircraft blockhouse towers were built by the Nazis during World War II. They are so solid that they were impossible to destroy. Some of them are empty today (like the one in Augarten), but some were given a new use like the Haus des Meeres, which has an aquarium.

The beautiful train station by Ullmann and Barvicius, which dated from 1872, was demolished (you can see some footage of it in a film called Mayerling), and a new building replaced it in 1978. The main idea behind the project was to create a space for offices above the station. Still very ugly.