Visitors to Vienna arriving from Schwechat airport can’t miss the four gigantic gas tanks that make up the historically rich Gasometer City.

From 1899 until 1969, the city’s coal gas supplies were stored here and their profane purpose disguised behind a handsome brick masonry façade. With the introduction of natural gas in 1969, Vienna’s Gasometers became defunct and remained largely unused for some 20 years—save for as the occasional exhibition space or as a film set, as in 1987’s James Bond movie The Living Daylights. In the early 1990s, Vienna’s party crowd used the deserted industrial plants as a grandiloquent backdrop for legendary rave events.

The partying ended in the late 1990s, when city planners commissioned a major reconstruction of the site. Viennese architecture firms Coop Himmelb(l)au, Manfred Wehdorn and Wilhelm Holzbauer along with French architect Jean Nouvel were each given the task of reconstructing one gas tank.

The result of their efforts is “Gasometer City,” which today comprises of a diverse mix of functions including municipal housing, student dormitories, office space, a large shopping mall, movie theaters, restaurants as well as the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, the archive of the city of Vienna.

Many of the original features of the four Gasometers—each boasting an imposing 90,000 cubic meters capacity—were all but eliminated in the design process. What remains is a rather tacky mall whose saving grace its mere eight-minute subway ride distance from the city center.