Until 2016, Nordbahn-Halle was an inconspicuous warehouse owned by a food and beverage wholesale and imports company in the run-down Nordbahnhof freight station complex. When the latter was vacated and plans were made for a new city district there, the owner, the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB), allowed TU Vienna to use the hall temporarily for the research project Mischung: Nordbahnhof (Mixing: Nordbahnhof). This was a follow-up project to Mischung: Possible! (Mixing: Possible!), initiated in 2015 by the cultural anthropologist, civil engineer, and spatial planner Christian Peer with the architect Silvia Forlati at TU Vienna’s Faculty of Architecture and Planning. Together with partners from practice and research, they had identified shortcomings in the implementation of mixed-use urban districts and developed alternative design processes. Mischung: Nordbahnhof was also funded by the federal government, and applied those new approaches in the Nordbahnhof urban development area over a two-year period. The warehouse became an experimental space for various uses, for which students in the TU design.build studio, under the direction of Peter Fattinger, developed a fitting architectural concept.
