The University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna (Universität für Bodenkultur BOKU) was established in 1872. First installed at Schönborn palace, the school moved in 1896 to a dedicated building designed by Alois Koch on a hillside northwest of the city centre. Additional buildings were added or purchased over time, gradually turning the leafy neighbourhood into “Vienna’s greenest campus”.
One such addition was the former private hospital for the merchant corporation of Vienna, built in 1910 after a design by Ernst Gotthilf von Miskolczy. Taken over by the city in 1939, it was later used as military hospital by the German Luftwaffe and after the war by Soviet and American occupation troops until 1955. In 1960, the disused hospital was purchased by BOKU university and renamed after engineer and BOKU professor Wilhelm Exner.
The 1980s saw a rapid rise in student enrollment and the need to further expand facilities. Plans to transform and extend the Exner Haus were drawn by Wolf Jürgen Reith starting in 1982 but budget pressure delayed their execution until the 1990s. Among the major transformations proposed by Reith was a new setting for the university library on the ground floor of the former hospital. Completed in 1996 after Reith’s untimely death, the new library finally offered enough room to store the 500,000 titles of its collection in one location. Its most distinguishing feature however is the reading room with its unusual ribbed curved glass wall, which recalls the sanatorium architecture of the early 20th century and fits well within the history of the building.
Ilse Wallentin Haus
Replacing a row of temporary barracks, the Ilse Wallentin Haus is BOKU Universit’y new library and conference centre. Completed in 2020, the building was designed by SWAP Architektur and Delta using structural timber beams. The glulam elements are kept raw inside and outside the building, turning the construction technique into a design element. 78% of the building’s mass is made out of wood, the biomass equivalent of the growth of all Austrian forests in 17 minutes. The pavilion is named after Ilse Wallentin, the first student to earn a doctorate from BOKU in 1924 for her work on the cultivation of medicinal and aromatic plants.
The images shown here date from July 2025. I’m grateful for the kind welcome I received during my visit, and for the helpful bibliographical references on the history of the Wilhelm Exner Haus and its library. Vielen Dank!
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