Festival Headquarters at Hietzinger Kai 101

This year’s Festival Headquarters will be located in a high-rise office building at Hietzinger Kai 101, designed by Harry Glück and situated directly next to the Unter-St.-Veit subway station. As the primary location for one of the most significant curated design events in Europe, the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK’s Festival Headquarters takes on great importance also in its anniversary year: In addition to the carefully selected exhibitions, installations, and events that can be experienced here from September 25 to October 4, 2026, the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK with this architecturally remarkable interim use once again creates the opportunity to take a closer look at the special features of Vienna’s urban history and development – with free admission, a lot of personality, and a high quality of stay.

The former headquarters of the insurance company Allianz was built from 1974 to 1976 and offers visitors to the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK not only diverse and spacious exhibition areas but also a number of curiosities: In and around the nine-story building, the festival makes use not only of former office spaces but also areas such as the old cafeteria with its front terrace and idyllic garden, a vehicle registration point, a kindergarten, and the bowling alleys in the basement.

Thanks to its size and striking geometric shape, the 1970s office building at Hietzinger Kai 101 ranks among the defining structures of its neighborhood. The building in Unter-St.-Veit is being made available to the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK by the family-run company Kollitsch Invest.

For nearly two decades, the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK has been telling the stories behind objects, creating space for experimentation, and connecting designers with craftsmanship, business, the city, and society. In 2026, the curated festival with an international focus and appeal will take place from September 25 to October 4 and, with specially commissioned projects in various festival formats, will once again offer a cultural perspective on design at its 20th edition.

Over the course of its nearly twenty-year history, the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK has been hosted in venues such as a grand palais, a dance and cinema venue, an old school or a city hall, industrial premises, a hotel in the Prater park, the so-called Blaues Haus near the Westbahnhof railway station, the former Sophienspital, the then still gleaming Karl Schwanzer building above the Franz-Josefs-Bahnhof station, a newly completed structure along the Landstraßer Gürtel, and most recently the workshop halls and showrooms of a former car dealership as the festival’s main venues. New since last year is the bundling of program items by location and schedule into so-called zones. The areas graphically highlighted in the festival program help visitors navigate the festival program spread across the entire city. Specific events such as openings, cocktail receptions, or talks are clustered within a zone so that visitors can visit them as part of a connected tour.