Without a doubt, when it comes to consistency, visual uniformity, and geometric alignment of a cityscape, Paris is unrivaled. Has been and promises to remain. But it is in Vienna‘s center that urban planners managed to achieve an even higher intensity of spectacle and overall artistic effect.
- Higher in fact than any single part of any major capital city.
- Its 5km long boulevard turned 150 in 2015 – the Ringstrasse – was without exaggeration 19th century’s most imposing street. To this day, it retains by and large the world’s greatest collection of historicist architecture.
Before going any further, let me narrow the list of great 19th century capitals to just two. By leaving aside London, by far the richest, largest, and most populous – and most introverted – of the three.
- While its much earlier transformation added Regent Street and Regent’s Park, the development and land use were guided by things typically British, practical, small-minded. Like the fixation on privacy, like the worshipping of all things private over public, including space. Like the emphasis of material accumulation and physical comfort over public display, like preservation of social segregation.
- Without any great loss of accuracy, I would focus my comparisons solely on Vienna and its great bon-vivant continental rival, coherent and centralized – Paris of Haussmann and Napoleon III – the only one that came close to the Ringstrasse in ambition, hyperscale, and style.
- A comparison, a mental bridge of sorts, between these projects of 19th century Continental Europe’s first and second cities should help provide context and perspective, especially since one of them is generally much better known.
Allow me to translate Vienna’s Ringstrasse zone into Parisian terms. Just to make it easier to visualize. What would it take for a Parisian street to balance the scales with the Ring and the vast collection of cultural institutions, monuments, civic buildings, and public spaces lining Vienna‘s main boulevard? My guess is the French capital would need to consolidate, combine, concentrate no fewer than two dozen of its most iconic landmarks – scattered all across its central arrondissements on each bank of the river – arranging them along a single circular street. A mix of ingredients needed for such Parisian-boulevard-to-rival-Ringstrasse might look something like this:
- Start with the Louvre – Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel – Tuilleries – Orangerie – Jeu de Paume axis, carefully pick off each of the mega monuments, they will form the core of the Ringstrasse-wanna-be super-street.
- Continue by adjoining Place Concorde with the Hotels de Crillon and de la Marine.
- Proceed to add to the pile the Palais Royal & Gardens and Palais de Justice. From the remaining monuments of the Right Bank’s smartest districts, append each of the Cour des Comptes, the Madeleine, the Grand & Petit Palais, the Bourse, and the Opera Garnier.
- Expand the collection by affixing from the Left Bank the Musee d’Orsay, the Assemblee Nationale, and the self-contained ensembles of Les Invalides and the Ecole Militaire – Champs de Mars. And make sure you do not leave out the Luxembourg Palace and Garden, the Sorbonne, or the Institut Francais.
- Back on the Right Bank, throw in the Hotel de Ville and the Comedie Francaise, Chatelet, de la Ville, Rond Point, and Marigny Theatres.
- This already saturated concoction won’t be complete without the Jacquemart Andre & Nissim Camondo museums and the former Jewish bankers’ mansions on the nearby rue de Monceau, the French capital’s answer to the magnificent Mietpalast/Wohnpalast, or rental/apartment palaces, built by prominent Jewish families along the Ringstrasse.
Such busy, eclectic recipe would check all the right boxes and might even eclipse the Ring – anything less, and your made-up Ringstrasse killer would risk of falling short on gravitas, conceding a win for Vienna.
The commonalities of the Ring and Haussmann’s boulevards are obvious. Both were urban mega projects that defined an entire era, a new and increasingly tolerant era.
- Both had a conservative rationale – contingency planning, enforcement, ease of access to the dense inner core of the capital – but ended up playing a liberal and progressive role, socially and culturally.
- Each marked a turning point as a symbolic new beginning for its capital, radically transforming the circulation and built environment of its host.
- Each of the two urban renewal schemes was conceived and blossomed as their respective empires slipped into relative decline, degenerating into military defeat at the hands of their more efficient neighbor to the North – perhaps consensus is right after all? – much like London in the 1960’s or Soviet cultural richness of the 1990s, well past their peak.
- Neither one any longer play the key part – the Ring in Vienna or the boulevards in Paris – it once did, except for a very marginal and literal role limited to motor vehicle circulation and ease of everyday access.
An attempt to contrast the philosophy of design of the two, in its broader sense, favors Vienna. The Ring around the ancient core cemented in place the capital’s already ultra-centralized social topology, securing it further. In contrast, the ad hoc corridors opened in Paris by Haussmann’s more controversial project only amplified the centrifugal momentum of its beautiful people, exacerbating the depopulation of its center.
- Haussmann’s mega project was in part, and first and foremost, about demolition – and displacement of about 200,000 people -not only about construction. Paris, more exposed to turbulent reforms, periodically abandoned by Europe’s largest court in favor of nearby Fontainebleau and then Versailles, had been free to expand for a while; its expansion, however, was far from concentric. The functional center of the French capital had not stopped crawling West during prior four centuries, leaving behind a changing social map and a maze of picturesque but often forsaken neighborhoods. This offered only a messy and broken string of brownfield sites as the canvas, the blueprint for the 19th century transformation, making demolition en masse all but unavoidable.
- In contrast, the Ringstrasse was a constructive, additive process of accretion rather than of dismantlement. Thanks to this largely cleared but still undeveloped buffer around its compact core – a rarity for a mid-19th century European metropolis – Vienna managed to avoid much of self-imposed wholesale destruction that rebuilding of a great city often entailed. The glacis park of the previous Vormartz era – which had replaced the old fortified zone, inactive since the Turkish-siege almost two centuries earlier – formed a beautiful gap between Vienna’s perfectly formed and complete inner city and a belt of former suburbs that encircled its immovable core. The readily available void happily absorbed the new and ambitious masterplan. Franz Josef’s mega project simply filled this gap, replacing a circular negative space with 800 glittering, purpose-built monumental buildings, gardens and palaces.
- This Central European metropolis managed to contain itself within its medieval footprint of enclosed baroque spaces – a byproduct of remarkable spatial stability of Vienna’s society. And its unchanging obsession – with tradition and with proximity to the court – throughout the centuries. Other parts of the Hapsburg capital also developed by filling an occasional gap or by ameliorating and beautifying the old rather than tearing down the existing.
- Once completed, the Ring’s concentric topology ensured that Vienna’s center remained contained, secure, and immovable. The new boulevard – with its ambitious, stylistically diverse rental apartment palaces of its commercial elite, its spectacular civic buildings, and its expansive, geometrically perfect public spaces – acting as the counterweight of culture and entertainment to the aristocratic inner city. Both the center and the Ring continue to define Vienna‘s functional center to this day. But without this frenzy of grand edifices, the former seat of the House of Habsburg would look more like Siena or Krakow, albeit on a larger scale, and less like a capital of the 19th century.
- In Paris, instead, the boulevards paved the way for accelerating the ongoing Westward migration even further – of the public center towards at least the Rond-Point-des-Champs-Elysees if not the Place de l’Etoile, of the upscale residential center towards Parc Monceau, of the fashionable blocks towards Avenue Montaigne and the Golden Triangle – more than a directional expansion, a real shift of the center of gravity of a great metropolis.
A greenfield project rather than adaptation, Ringstrasse offered a more fertile ground for imagination and symbolism, both in its big picture narrative and in the details of its design.
- Vienna’s approach to spatial planning and land use was always exquisitely three-dimensional – a look sideways at any point is bound to be as rewarding in richness of detail as the longer perspective straight ahead – and the Ring only preserved and amplified this character. The Ringstrasse zone succeeded at fabrication and regulation of a great modern city. A modern circular ‘city’ placed to envelop one of Europe’s most built-up, dense old centers. And does it on an industrial scale and with impeccable attention to detail, and a respect for all three dimensions.
- Paris boulevards, in contrast, offered no more than a linear, traditionally two-dimensional perspective that draws and channels all attention down the length of the street and nowhere else. One that focuses the eye on a monument at the far end, as if on purpose distracting from the relative plainness of the surfaces – all facades and their features must be the same, any deviation a sign of provincialism – of the building envelope lining the avenue. A end monument sometimes existing, often brand new, placed at a bend of the new boulevard for no other purpose than to form a visual anchor.
- With all due respect for the French rigor and simplicity, I pick the richness of Vienna’s 3D character. Hardly an original thought: Schorske himself insisted – he was the first to open the spigot on the ‘Vienna as the metropolis of modernity’ debate in the 1960s – that the Ringstrasse ‘surpassed in visual impact any urban reconstruction…, even that of Paris.’
- Ringstrasse’s obsession with classical detail was ultimately validated when Paris wrote the next chapter in the book of aesthetics, even if it took longer for the rational, anti-Baroque, classicistic French mind – of clean, restrained lines, Diderot and d’Alembert – to embrace it. As architectural fashions changed and public opinion turned against the standardization of the Second Empire, the once praised sameness, uniformity, and cold precision of Haussmann’s monotonous boulevards were abandoned in favor of heavier sculptural ornamentation – just look at the undulating facades along rue Reaumur and other new, less restrained Belle Époque streets, at the grand train stations and public buildings of the Third Republic Paris. A belated recognition, although by then Vienna was already moving on to cutting-edge anti-Ringstrasse and anti-neoclassical theories of its very own Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner. Vienna, once again, a step ahead – all the wrought iron, bay-wide plate glass, and reinforced concrete of the turn-of-the-century Paris notwithstanding – even if not always moving as linearly, or in the same direction.
- The Ring’s topology is not one formed by a continuous corridor but by a series of circular segments with a spatially developed character and a constant reference to the common center, the Innere Stadt. Axial continuity is maintained – temporarily, over a short distance ahead – by the tram tracks and tree lines only.
- One part of the circular boulevard is occupied by Neue Burg, the monumental extension of Hofburg, flanked on either side by the Burggarten and the Volksgarten. It is facing the spectacular, palatial KHM and NHM museums, of Art History and Natural History, both hosting and artfully displaying content that is top-notch in every way imaginable. The twin museums frame Maria-Theresien Platz like giant guard rails, forming – together with the Heldenplatz, hugged by the monumental, concave front of the Neue Burg – the unfinished Kaiserforum interrupted by WWI.
- Another segment immediately adjacent to it – on the W flank of the Ring – is anchored by four of Vienna’s most important establishments – the Parliament, the Rathaus, the University, and Burgtheater, the top classical theater in the German speaking world. Housed in some of the former Imperial capital’s most imposing and spatially sophisticated structures, this standalone group of monuments is arranged in a symmetrical geometric pattern, forming its own enclosed open spaces. It enriches the Ringstrasse with a complex interplay of setbacks, elevations, gardens.
- At these garden sections, the Ring expands from its nominal width of 60 meters – very wide for its time – to nearly 500 meter width, measuring as clear space between opposing facades. The Ringstrasse zone is wider still: it subsumes not only entire ensembles of monumental buildings and parks but also parallel streets lined by porticoed sidewalks. In a perverse way, the transverse dimension becomes the dominant one here, dictating the direction to follow and turning enclosed spaces into outdoor rooms, spaced along a void that circumnavigates the city center.
If achieving the pinnacle of mixed use development was the objective, Ringstrasse can claim victory – the multitude of uses enjoyed by the public and private spaces along Vienna’s boulevard is matched by the plurality of its styles celebrating every remarkable epoch of Western civilization, as if Vienna could not decide and settle on one.
- The Continent’s highest concentration of official buildings on a single street is an open air museum of historicist architecture, littered with styles of different epochs that blend effortlessly here. Monumental, symbolic, and not overly domestic, most of the Ring forms a gilded circuit of the Empire’s administrative buildings laid out on a palatial scale and interconnected by public gardens.
- Other parts are residential, underwritten at inception of the Ringstrasse development by a 30-year tax abatement – this sounds jarringly out of place, impossibly modern, bureaucratic, utilitarian – for buildings that are started in the first year and are finished by year five. Excluding a few aristocratic Adelspalais residences near Schwarzenbergplatz (for archdukes Wilhelm and Ludwig Viktor), most residential properties along the Ring are so-called Mietpalast or rental palaces, built before the stock exchange crash of 1873. Built by Jewish bankers and industrialists from all over the Empire, determined to not miss a great opportunity to imitate palatial aristocratic style and, in some cases, to assert a cleaner version in their own style. As a result, the Ring’s residential hotels – their detail heavily overdesigned, their interiors overwhelming, their scale a bold display of confidence of the liberal upper middle class that felt completely in sync with the monarchy’s aristocratic traditions – look nothing like your local town’s tax abatement zone.
- The Ringstrasse was sponsored by the Kaiser, executed by Europe’s best architects, underwritten and sponsored by the Jews, and is linked inextricably to the social advancement of Europe’s Jewish elite. Conceived effectively as an informal partnership of the court and prominent bankers, the Ring was a triumph of emancipation and formal equality of the globalist Vienna Jew, asserting his new secular role in the world city, and displaying his economic indispensability.
- The Empire’s most prestigious and exclusive boulevard housed just 55 exquisite private properties – its residential development preceded the completion of the public buildings by a decade and a half – of which 44, a dominant share of the total, owned by wealthy Jews. Who were also active as public patrons of the arts.
- But the Ring is most celebrated for its cultural and civil monuments dedicated to imperial and urban governance, learning, theater, music, military, and commercial activities. Its public and private projects offered important milestones of early success to mentors of modernism like Klimt (his leading work for Hans Makart in the celebration of Emperor’s Jubilee) and Otto Wagner (his most successful banker palaces and interiors) before the two giants of visual arts turned anti-classical, iconoclastic, and rebellious.
Despite such illustrious past and exalted status, the Ring today is a shadow of its former self, and warrants a delicate approach if you wish to avoid frustration.
- Like long stretches of today’s Parisian boulevards, parts of Ringstrasse seem devoid of life, former grandeur replaced by signs of wear and even neglect if not decay – take this with a grain of salt and keep in mind relative value here, Viennese ‘wear’, ‘neglect’, and ‘decay’ don’t begin to approach the distress of other cities, I am just managing expectations.
- The evolution of traffic patterns in the past decades marginalized the Ring as the place to be seen. Ringstrasse managed to escape the fate of some streets cut by Napoleon III through affluent arrondissements of Western Paris – boulevard Haussmann or rue Tronchet have been abandoned by the pedestrian in a near complete handover to the motorist, and now differ little from highways – Vienna is quieter, its built environment more artfully orchestrated to fit its more manageable traffic demands. Besides, abandonment to gritty reality of chaotic urban periphery is what Gurtel is for: the outer ring of Vienna happens to be Europe’s busiest in terms of traffic and must be avoided other than for targeted outings to late night music venues in the archways under the elevated subway. By comparison, the Ringstrasse does not offend and is just fine.
- A face lift to the Ring’s paving – and its signage, benches, streetlamps and landscaping – is long overdue, and while ambitious renewal plans were dusted off as Ringstrasse celebrated 150th anniversary last year, its street furniture falls desperately short of that of Paris or London. It doesn’t even measure up to certain central blocks of Prague and Budapest, where impeccably restored cast iron street lamp posts steal the attention from all the tram wires and occasional ambient contrasts. This is evidence that Vienna‘s post-war restoration was not distributed uniformly, benefitting public landmarks more than the nearby rental apartment palaces: rebuilding there was more utilitarian than it should have been, leaving some open spaces looking more like small parking lots than dignified features of old Europe’s once greatest street.
My advice on digesting the Ringstrasse?
- Despite what’s on display here, taking time for a purposeful exploration of Ringstrasse in its totality may be counterproductive. I would leave the navigation up and down the longer stretches of the boulevard proper to the motive power of the Ringstrasse tram, and more broadly the search for impressive linear perspectives – to walks around Paris and St Petersburg. Here instead, I would take advantage of the rich and purposeful layout, and of the landmarks, monuments, gardens, and open public spaces, arranged along individual segments of the broader Ringstrasse. I would define the depth of this zone as at least one block inside the ring and one outside.
- On the other hand, shorter sorties across the ring and around its zone should be pursued with keen interest. The boulevard’s built environment was created as the pinnacle of multi-dimensional Gesamkunstwerk – its multiple shorter transverse perspectives are of equal quality with the Ring’s main axis. Vienna’s exceptional three-dimensionality, density, and exquisite detailing are at work here, and the Ring‘s circular layout clearly helps break down the space into shorter perspectives, equalize the lateral and longitudinal dimensions, and maintain multiplicity of equally interesting views. This part of town would be a good place to look for a better vantage point, for aerial views – skyline features at the eye level – from one of the hotel rooftops, balconies, or high floor windows of its public buildings.
- Don’t plan a walk along the Ring, let it come to you instead – a casual experience of crossing the boulevard on your way to see something else will open up more detail and dimension than you ever wanted – the ingenious planning and positioning of its museums and monuments along the road funnels foot traffic and directs eyeballs to its most scenic parts, forcing you to come in contact with its major pivotal points. And if you must also develop an axial view, take the tram for a spin – or two- around the Innere Stadt.
