Urania

Urania is a Vienna-based public educational institute and observatory.

Urania Observatory (German: Urania Sternwarte) was erected in 1909 near the mouth of the Wien River according to the plans of Art Nouveau style architect Max Fabiani (a pupil of Otto Wagner) and opened in 1910 by Franz Joseph I of Austria as an educational center with a public observatory. It was named after Urania, the Muse of Astronomy.

The Urania was extensively damaged during WWII, and the dome with the observatory was demolished. It reopened in 1957 after extensive renovations. Technically, the observatory has been constantly enhanced throughout the years.

Though it currently serves new purposes, the Urania remains a public observatory. Currently, the Urania also has seminar rooms where various workshops and lectures are held, a movie theater that shows during the annual Viennale film festival, and a puppet theater designed by actor Hans Kraus. The Urania also has a memorial room for the Kindertransport, which was organized by Dutch resistance fighter and humanitarian Mrs Gertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer, who managed to rescue the first 600 Jewish children from Vienna in early December 1938 after direct negotiations with Adolf Eichmann in Vienna. It also has a café and is Austria’s oldest public observatory.Carl Julius Haidvogel, an award-winning Austrian writer, formerly worked as an editor there.

Between 2000 and 2003, the Urania building was refurbished and currently houses an adult education center, an observatory, a cinema, the Urania puppet theater, and a café-bar-restaurant.There are various lecture and presentation rooms in the building for a variety of functions, as required by the adult education center’s vast range of courses.

Every semester, there are over 450 adult education classes, approximately 100 lectures, cultural festivals, symposia, debate events, film screenings, and other activities on a wide range of themes on the schedule.

The specialties offered are:

• economy and personality
• computers and multimedia
• politics and society
• Arts and Culture
• health, exercise and nutrition
• children and parents

One focus is language courses, which (as of 2013) are offered for the following languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, German, English, Finnish, French, Greek, Hindi, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Croatian, Latin, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Slovak, Spanish, Czech, Turkish, Ukrainian and Hungarian.