Tower DC 1 is the first stage of a multifunctional high-rise complex, which is being implemented on the territory of Donausiti, Vienna's new business district. Dominique Perrault received the right to design this object back in 2002, when he won an international architectural competition organized by the development company WED.
According to the project, it was planned to build two towers on the banks of the Danube and organize a public space between them. The high-rise volumes in the plan would have the usual form of parallelepipeds, if not for their main facades: facing each other, they represent surfaces with many chips and notches, giving the impression that once the skyscrapers were halves of a single monolith. However, the architect did not offer two completely identical buildings: the height of DC 1 is 220 meters, while its counterpart, tower DC 2, will grow by only 160 meters. It is also important that in relation to the embankment, Perrault puts these volumes at a slight angle - from the water the dramatic tectonics of the main facades is perfectly visible, giving a bright, memorable character to the entire new area.
All the "chips" are glass, which fills the facade with glare and reflections, giving it an additional dimension. The architect himself compares the resulting surface to the powerful flow of a river and takes pride in how visually light it looks.
And if glass dominates undividedly in the facing of facades, then in the design of interiors, on the contrary, the most "hard" materials are used - metal, natural stone, concrete. The architects deliberately did not hide the supporting structures of the building, but made them an integral part of the interior spaces of the tower.
The same approach was used in the design of the stylobate part of the complex - least of all the authors of the project wanted the glass tower to look like a skyscraper accidentally nestled on the river bank. On the contrary, the skyscraper, like a tree with developed roots, organically grows out of the existing urbanistic "soil": the vast underground part (the area of which is only half the area of the aboveground part of the complex) is used to organize a pedestrian esplanade, and the first levels of the tower are supplemented by a developed rectangular volume, in where social functions are concentrated. The plaza between the towers is protected from bad weather by square umbrellas made of black metal.
