Augarten Flak Tower: The Concrete Giant
Why is it significant?
There it is, rising above the chestnut trees of a Baroque park: a windowless cylinder of grey concrete, about fifty-five metres high, with a platform of jutting gun emplacements around the top. Birds circle it. Joggers pass at its feet. It is completely out of place, and it will never go away.
Key Facts
| Place | Augarten Flak Tower: The Concrete Giant |
|---|---|
| Address | Augarten, 1020 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.22580, 16.37330 |
| Part of Walk | The Island Across the Canal: Vienna's Leopoldstadt, Augarten and Prater |
| Generated | Generated |
There it is, rising above the chestnut trees of a Baroque park: a windowless cylinder of grey concrete, about fifty-five metres high, with a platform of jutting gun emplacements around the top. Birds circle it. Joggers pass at its feet. It is completely out of place, and it will never go away.
This is a Flakturm, a flak tower, built by the Nazi regime in 1944 and 1945 to defend Vienna against Allied bombers. The towers came in pairs: a round gun tower like this one, carrying heavy anti-aircraft guns, and a square fire-control tower with radar and rangefinders, which you can see further north in the park. Vienna received three pairs, in the Augarten, in Arenbergpark and in Esterházypark, designed by the architect Friedrich Tamms. Much of the work was done by forced labourers.
They were also meant as shelters, and thousands of civilians crowded inside during air raids. And they were meant as monuments: the plans foresaw cladding them in stone after a victory, as memorials to the war. History made other plans.
After 1945 the problem was simple: how do you remove something like this? The walls are metres thick, reinforced with steel, and blowing them up in the middle of a residential district would have shattered every window around, or worse. So they stayed. Over the decades Vienna has made its peace with them, more or less. One in Esterházypark now holds an aquarium, the Haus des Meeres, with a climbing wall on the outside. Another serves as a storage depot. The two here in the Augarten stand mostly empty, fenced off, home mostly to pigeons.
Stand here for a moment and think of the contrast. Behind you, a garden of clipped lime avenues opened to the people by an enlightened emperor. In front of you, the concrete fist of a dictatorship. Both are part of Vienna. Now follow the long avenue east through the park towards the Baroque palace, where something much more delicate is made.