Convention Center
In September 1958 parts of the Hofburg were opened to the public as convention center. Europe's first imperial convention centre played an important role in the development of the congress and meeting tourism in Vienna. In the first ten years the BHÖ (Burghauptmannschaft Österreich) ran the convention center; since 1969 a private company (HOFBURG Vienna - Wiener Kongresszentrum Hofburg Betriebsgesellschaft)has been managing the international congress and events center. HOFBURG Vienna offers 182,000 sq ft (16,900 m2) of floor space spread across 35 rooms for events for anything from 50 to 4,900 people. Every year the convention center hosts about 300 to 350 events with around 300,000 to 320,000 guests. Among the events are conventions and meetings as well as banquets, trade fairs, concerts and balls. In addition to this HOFBURG Vienna is the permanent conference seat of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
Read more about this topic: Hofburg Palace, HOFBURG Vienna
Famous quotes containing the words convention and/or center:
“The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by handa center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)