Architect Hannes Lintl laid the foundation stone on October 12, 1962, and the completion took place less than two years later: on April 16, 1964, the Danube Tower in Vienna was completed and opened on the occasion of the Vienna International Garden Show (WIG). The building rises 252 meters into the air and is the tallest domestic structure. The Bisamberg television station held this record between 1957 and the explosion in 2010.
The “concrete needle”, as the Danube Tower is called, and the surrounding Danube Park were once considered prestige projects with which Vienna wanted to position itself as a cosmopolitan city. The history of the site was not originally a glorious one: it once served as a military firing range, during the Nazi era as an execution site, and then as a garbage dump.
The model for the Danube Tower was the television towers built in Stuttgart and Dortmund in the 1950s. Unlike them, the Danube Tower was never used as a platform for TV broadcasting systems. There are facilities for police radio, mobile communications systems and, since the late 1990s, VHF transmitters on the top of the tower.
Picture gallery: The Danube Tower turns 60: Austria’s tallest building then and now
Danube Tower 60 years (Photo: Donauturm | Lintl) Bild 1/12
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However, interest among the population was always great: in 1964, more than half a million people wanted to admire the Danube Tower from above. Those interested had to wait up to two hours for the ride, which cost ten shillings – despite all the lift attendants working extra shifts. The Danube Tower currently attracts around 420,000 visitors every year.
Criticism of the construction costs
Then as now, visitors were offered a lot: in addition to the tower with the rotating viewing platform and restaurant, the Lilliputbahn, the Irissee and modern pavilions. Guests used to be transported using a two-seater chairlift, the only one in Vienna that existed until the 1980s. The Danube Tower did not always meet with unanimous approval. The cost of around 60 million schillings was criticized at the time.
Millions of flowers and 30,000 deciduous trees were planted for the WIG, which ran from April to November 1964. The show attracted more than 2.3 million people. Almost 20 years later, 300,000 people flocked to the Danube Park to listen to a holy mass by Pope John Paul II. A 40-meter-high, 56-ton steel cross commemorates his visit.
A semi-transparent outdoor slide opened on the north side of the tower in autumn 2023: It starts at a height of 165 meters, leads to the terrace 15 meters below – and is called the “highest slide in Europe”.
