Innsbruck's Zaha Hadid Double

The first time I saw the Bergisel tower from Maria-Theresien-Strasse, I genuinely thought something had gone wrong with my sense of scale. Behind the pastel facades and the Triumphal Arch, a curved white mast rose out of the tree line on the hill above Bergisel, looking less like a piece of sports infrastructure than a spacecraft that had come down at an angle and stuck. It took me a return trip and a bit of reading to understand that the tower wasn’t a one-off. Five years after it opened, the same architect built four more structures on the other side of the city, and together the two projects tell you more about how Innsbruck sees itself than any museum label does.

One name, two commissions

Zaha Hadid is the connection. In 2002 her studio completed the Bergisel ski jump, replacing an older, more conventional tower with a 90-metre curved concrete-and-steel structure that combines the jump’s in-run with a viewing platform and cafe at the top.

Five years later, in 2007, the same studio delivered the four stations of the Hungerburgbahn funicular, which carries passengers from the old town up to the district of Hungerburg on the lower slopes of the Nordkette. Between those two dates, Innsbruck effectively ran a five-year architectural project without ever calling it one: a working ski jump at one end of the city and a piece of everyday transit infrastructure at the other, both shaped by the same design language.

That’s the detail I find most interesting, more than either building on its own. It would be easy for a city to commission one landmark and call it done. Innsbruck commissioned a landmark, then five years later handed the same architect a piece of infrastructure that ordinary commuters and skiers use every single day, in all weather, without a ticket price attached to admiring the architecture. One is a monument you visit; the other is a station you pass through on the way to somewhere else. Having both, by the same hand, is what makes this a double rather than a single striking building.

The tower over the ski jump

The Bergisel tower does double duty. As a ski jump it hosts a round of the Four Hills Tournament every January, drawing crowds that fill the slope below the in-run. As architecture, it’s the reason to go even outside competition dates. The curved concrete pylon rises out of the hillside and carries a steel mast up to a viewing platform and a small cafe, both open to visitors on a paid ticket most days of the year.

From up there the whole Inn valley opens out: the old town roofs, the river, and the Nordkette wall on the far side of the city. At the foot of the tower sits Das Tirol Panorama, a separate building housing the giant circular painting of the 1809 Battle of Bergisel — so the same hill carries a monument to Tyrol’s Napoleonic-era history and a monument to its most recent architectural ambition, standing a few hundred metres apart.

What struck me on my visit was how little the tower tries to blend in. Innsbruck’s old town is Gothic arcades, Renaissance oriels and baroque church interiors; the tower makes no attempt to echo any of that. It reads as a deliberate counterpoint rather than an accident of a different era’s taste, and once you’ve registered that choice on Bergisel, the second building makes a lot more sense.

Organic stations on the way to Hungerburg

The Hungerburgbahn stations use a different vocabulary from the tower — smoother, closer to a wave than a mast — but they come from the same design instinct. Each of the four stations along the line is shaped as a continuous shell-like form, rendered in white with glass panels set into the curves, so the structure looks poured rather than assembled from parts.

The line itself solves a real problem: it’s the first stage of the fastest ascent from a European city centre into high mountain terrain, carrying passengers from the valley floor up toward Hungerburg, where the Nordkette cable car continues higher still toward Hafelekar. Riding it, you’re inside a piece of contemporary architecture doing genuinely useful transit work, not standing outside admiring a monument from a respectful distance.

I’d recommend walking the lowest station at Congress before you ride anything. It sits at ground level near the river and the Hofburg, and seeing its curves against the flat riverside path — rather than against a mountain backdrop — makes the shape easier to read as architecture rather than as scenery.

Why this wasn’t a coincidence

Cities don’t usually stumble into a matched pair of buildings by the same architect five years apart. Commissioning Hadid twice, once for sport and once for transit, reads as a statement: Innsbruck wanted a contemporary architectural identity that could sit next to, rather than compete with, its Gothic and baroque core. The Goldenes Dachl and the Hofkirche were never going anywhere, and nobody proposed replacing them. What the city added instead was a second, newer layer, placed at its edges — on a hillside used for sport, and along a transit line used for commuting — rather than forced into the historic centre itself.

That’s a useful way to plan a visit, too. If you only walk the old town, you’ll see Innsbruck’s five centuries of imperial and baroque history and none of its twenty-first-century architectural confidence. If you only ride the funicular and visit the tower, you’ll get the opposite. Doing both in the same day is what makes the contrast land.

Doing both in a single day

The two sites aren’t next to each other, but they’re close enough to combine without a car. Start at Bergisel — reachable by bus or a short taxi ride from the centre — and spend an hour on the tower and the panorama painting. Head back into town for lunch, then walk to the Congress station near the Hofburg and ride the Hungerburgbahn up to Hungerburg. From there you can turn straight back down, having covered both buildings in half a day, or carry on up the Nordkette cable car if the weather is holding.

For a different vantage point on the tower itself, worth doing on a separate morning, a sunrise tour on the Patscherkofel puts you on the mountain across the valley from Bergisel, looking back at the city with the tower silhouetted against the old town. If you’d rather see how the same funicular-and-architecture idea plays out elsewhere in Tyrol, a roundtrip funicular ride to the Rosshütte near Seefeld is a useful comparison, on a smaller scale and without the Hadid pedigree.

Families splitting the day between architecture and something more physical for the kids often add a family hike through the Ehnbach gorge near Innsbruck, which is a short drive from town and a complete change of register from concrete curves.

And if contemporary design is the thread you’re pulling on, the entrance building at Wattens is worth the detour — a Swarovski Crystal Worlds ticket and transfer gets you to André Heller’s giant-head entrance, a very different but equally deliberate piece of architectural theatre built in the same spirit of taking a visitor experience seriously as design.

Building	Architect	Completed	Function
Bergisel ski jump tower	Zaha Hadid	2002	Ski jump in-run, viewing platform, cafe
Hungerburgbahn stations (4)	Zaha Hadid	2007	Funicular stations, Congress to Hungerburg

I keep coming back to how compact this all is. A city of about 131,000 people has two Hadid-designed structures within a few kilometres of each other, bracketing five years in which it clearly decided what kind of place it wanted to be seen as — historic at the core, unafraid of contemporary form at the edges. You don’t need to know any of this to enjoy either building. But once you’ve spotted the connection, you notice it every time you look up at that tower on Bergisel or step inside one of those curved glass stations, and the walk between the two starts to feel like a short course in how Innsbruck thinks about itself.

Zaha Hadid’s Innsbruck buildings: quick questions

Did the same architect really design both the Bergisel ski jump and the Hungerburgbahn stations?

Yes. Zaha Hadid designed the Bergisel ski jump tower, opened in 2002, and the four Hungerburgbahn funicular stations, completed in 2007. The two projects bookend a five-year stretch when Innsbruck deliberately layered contemporary architecture onto a baroque and Renaissance old town.

Can I visit both buildings in one day?

Easily. The Bergisel ski jump is a short bus or taxi ride from the old town, and the lowest Hungerburgbahn station at Congress is a fifteen-minute walk from Maria-Theresien-Strasse. Most visitors do the jump in the morning and ride the funicular up to Hungerburg in the afternoon.

Do I need a ticket to see the Hungerburgbahn stations themselves?

No. The stations are open, walk-through structures you can admire for free from outside and from the platform. A ticket is only needed to ride the funicular itself.

Is the Bergisel tower only for ski jumping events?

No. Outside competition dates the tower operates as a year-round viewing platform with a cafe, open daily except for scheduled maintenance closures, regardless of whether jumping is taking place.

What else did Zaha Hadid design in the Alps near Innsbruck?

Within the immediate Innsbruck area, the ski jump tower and the four Hungerburgbahn stations are her two built works. She did not design the Nordkette cable car stages above Hungerburg, which predate both projects in their original form.

Why does this contrast between old and new architecture matter for a visit?

It shapes how the city reads on foot. Within the same afternoon you pass Renaissance courtyards and baroque facades, then a glass-and-concrete funicular station, then a jump tower shaped like a tilted crane over the rooftops — a compression of eras that is unusual for a city this size.