Expansion Plans for a Modern Library
Starting in 1918, a bitter struggle for the Neue Burg raged between the Art Historical Museum and the National Library. Like the officials of the former Court Museum, the management of the library saw the political changes of 1918 as an opportunity to remedy their chronic shortage of space. Position papers and plans followed, but a combination of the poor economic situation and inflation on the one hand, and the succession of conflicting decisions on the other—first in the Republic and then in the dictatorships—delayed the expansion of the Hofburg wing that had been designated in 1924 for conversion to museum and library use. During the National Socialist period, the director of the library found new hope and presented expansion plans on an enormous scale. The designs featured a 140-metre-long, four-storey extension in the Burggarten to replace the palm house, and called for a neighbouring housing block to be demolished. The new building was to have so much space that the National Library could move out of all its existing rooms in the Hofburg, leaving them available for other users. But these plans, like those before, stayed on paper.
It was only after the end of Nazi rule that the time came for the expansion of the Austrian National Library. In 1956 the state, as owner of the Hofburg, promised the library a large part of its present-day rooms in the Neue Burg for its urgently needed expansion and modernisation. The rooms in the cellar and basement were followed by the ground floor and mezzanine in the left Segment Tract and the central hall at ground level. The architects used floor-to-ceiling glass walls to separate the great entrance hall, which previously served as a warehouse, from the staircase, because the space was intended to serve as an entrance not just to the library but also to the art historical collections housed on the first floor (Weapons Collection and Collection of Historic Musical Instruments). The redevelopment of the library into what was then called the Modern Library was completed in 1966. It was designed by the major architectural firm Theiss & Jaksch, which had also been responsible for a central library plan in the 1930s and further library plans during the Nazi period.
The opening of the reading rooms on 28 September 1966 meant that the four-decade long battle for ownership of the final expansion wing of the Wiener Hofburg was at an end, and the Neue Burg had found its permanent role. Today, the gates of the palace wing between Heldenplatz and the Burggarten are open to visitors to the Austrian National Library, and with it the House of Austrian History, and to the Art Historical Museum, which includes the Weltmuseum Wien. Diverse collections and initiatives from these two great institutions may move in and out of various rooms in the building, but the Neue Burg’s dedicated purpose as a home for museums and libraries has remained in place to this day.
