Anti-aircraft gun tower 5, L-Tower, Esterhazypark
Nazi-era anti-aircraft control tower with meter-thick concrete walls, now a public aquarium of over ten thousand sea creatures.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to anti-aircraft tower 5 in Vienna's Esterhazypark starts with the words an American artist wrapped around its roof in 1991, then works back to the tower's construction from 1942 under Nazi architect Friedrich Tamms, built in months by forced laborers and prisoners of war. It traces the fortress's strange postwar afterlife, when its walls proved too thick to demolish and it became in turn a hotel, a fire station and a children's observatory. Look up at the roofline as you listen for the words still wrapped around it.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Haus des Meeres (House of the Sea)
Ten-floor aquarium and zoo inside a WWII anti-aircraft tower, with sharks, crocodiles and a rooftop terrace.
Augarten
Baroque public garden with tree-lined avenues, an Enlightenment-era porcelain works, and two hulking wartime flak towers.
Pathological-anatomical collection in the Narrenturm
Circular former eighteenth-century asylum tower now holding one of the world's largest pathology specimen collections.
Ankerbrotfabrik
Former industrial bakery complex turned art hub, with galleries and studios inside its old brick halls.