Among over 100 guests of honor were Vienna’s State Governor and Mayor Dr. Michael Häupl and District Chairman Eva-Maria Hatzl. Building work on the shopping center was started in December 2014 and is fully on schedule despite the onset of winter. The foundation plate is currently being cemented. The owner is the Jost Hurler Group based in Munich, represented by CEO Dr. Wolfgang Müller. The project partner is SES Spar European Shopping Centers, headed by CEO Marcus Wild, which has been the operator of the HUMA Shopping Center for many years. The center was designed by the Chapman Taylor architects practice in Düsseldorf. General engineering is being carried out by ATP architects engineers, Innsbruck.
A shopping center of superlatives with a gross leasable area of 50,000 square meters is being built with more than 90 shops, restaurants, cafés and services, 2,000 free parking spaces and 800 jobs. The new HUMA Shopping Center will open in 2016 and work will be finished on an additional extension by 2017.
Building has been carried out on the 12-hectare site since December 2014. Altogether some 50,000 cubic meters of cast-in-place concrete and 5,200 tonnes of reinforced steel are being used. For the building services, approx. 600 km of cabling will be laid down and connected. The construction area was prepared with some 7,000 vibration-driven piles with a total length of about 30,000 meters. The shopping center is being laid on this base by means of raft and individual foundations. The base plate is currently being concreted at the basement level – the same size as six football fields together. The gross floor space of the building amounts to more than 72,000 square meters. A 20-cm-thick monolithic floor slab in sections is being produced for the sales areas on the first floor. Some 100 to 120 workers are currently engaged on the building site. Six revolving tower cranes are in use during the first construction phase.
“With this cornerstone we’re laying a firm and sustainable foundation for the continuing successful future of HUMA in the Simmering location,” explains Marcus Wild, CEO of SES Spar European Shopping Centers at the cornerstone ceremony. “HUMA in Simmering has been a retail location with tradition for a long time. And the future will bring even more: SES together with Jost Hurler has conceived a completely new, groundbreaking center with modernity and panache which will inspire customers. It’s all about great brands, a big variety of gastronomic outlets and a pleasant atmosphere where people are happy to pass the time and meet friends – and all this combined with tasteful architecture and fantastic events. Just having our fingers on the pulse of the time is not enough – we’re creating emotional locations and shopping destinations of the future loved by all generations.”
Thanks to sophisticated construction logistics, the HUMA Shopping Center will remain open for uninterrupted shopping throughout the rebuilding work. In 2013 shopping center operations were moved to an interim location within the plot of land on Landwehrstrasse along with the most important anchor businesses, such as MediaMarkt, Interspar, McDonalds, H&M and other partner shops. So even during the construction work, HUMA is offering customers an extremely attractive mix of shops.
