"Lost Garden" Adorns Passage in Vienna's Meidling Station
Images of the vanished Pronaygarten now adorn the passage of the heavily frequented commuter hub. The historical park fell victim to the construction of the Southern Railway. The artist Christian Kosmas Mayer has resurrected it in his design "The Lost Garden". He prevailed in a competition for the design of the station.
A plaque in the station, which is used by around 85,000 passengers daily according to ÖBB, provides information about the historical background. It reveals that Sigismund Freiherr von Pronay acquired an extensive green area near the current station site in 1817. He transformed it with rare pelargoniums into one of the most magnificent Biedermeier gardens, where the composer Ludwig van Beethoven is said to have enjoyed walking.
Green Paradise at Vienna-Meidling Station
By 1839, the garden paradise was already history. The facility had to make way for the construction of the Southern Railway line - for which the Meidling station was also built. There are no original illustrations left. The artist developed a speculative reconstruction after intensive historical research using artificial intelligence. For this, he had sketches revised by AI image generators, which he had "trained" among other things with available historical sources.
The artwork now extends over more than 300 square meters along the wall of the passage. "In a multi-stage creative interplay between my edits and the results of the AI, representations were created that are based on facts and yet pure fantasy. For me, they are imaginations of the lost images of this long-vanished garden," Christian Kosmas Mayer stated at the presentation on Thursday.
The ÖBB implemented the installation in cooperation with the City of Vienna and the initiative "KÖR Art in Public Space", as stated in a press release. Erich Pirkl, the managing director of ÖBB Immobilienmanagement GmbH, also pointed to other modernisation measures in Meidling, such as the redesign of the waiting area: "Meidling station, as Vienna's second most important transport hub, is of central importance. Our goal is to create places with our stations where people feel comfortable and like to linger."
(APA/Red)
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