unsere TU Wien

Places of memory - From Prater to Arsenal, Karlsplatz and Getreidemarkt

A fuTUrefit project

The history of TU Wien is being written every day – and we all contribute to it. Josef Ressel who invented the screw propeller in 1827 is part of the story of TU Wien, so are Emma, who will defend her thesis in June; Ali, who moved to Vienna two years ago to work on his PhD; and Irmgard, who has been collecting the post every day for the past twelve years.

In our project “unsere TU Wien” (uTU), we aim to document the history of TU Wien more comprehensively than has been the case to date: we wish not only to record the history of major inventions, the development and expansion of the campuses and the buildings in which TU Wien has been based since 1815; but we also wish to give space to individual memories. With our platform TU Memory Map we collect not only “‘history’ as a stratigraphic deposit of memory” (Falser 2008, 13), but also stories that have shaped or continue to shape our time at TU Wien.

Students, current staff, alumni and emeriti are able to upload visual material relating to the buildings of TU Wien and the personal memories they associate with them to this platform (photos, historical views of buildings, drawings, etc.). This dataset will be visualised online in the form of an interactive map. In addition to these stories, the platform also conveys the architectural history of the TU’s campuses and buildings, thanks to numerous photos and plans from the TU Wien archive.

This Summer, these “places of memory” will be even more directly accessible on-site with the help of extended reality: we will enable users to explore their own and others’ memories on-site using a mobile device (smartphone, tablet). In addition, we are developing an immersive experience (head-mounted display) that can be tried out at selected events.

The project “unsere TU Wien. Places of memory - From Prater to Arsenal, Karlsplatz and Getreidemarkt” is a collaboration between the Heritage Conservation, Geoinformation and Computer Graphics research units, the TU Wien Archive and the Department of Data Protection and Document Management and has received funding from the fuTUrefit Call 2025.