Austria may have lost its Empire and has become more socialist and egalitarian than most European countries but Vienna remains thoroughly aristocratic (just camp out by the entrance to the Opera and study people – unlike the nouveau riche, one has to be borne with this sense of confidence) while at the same time retaining its sense of urban Mitteleropa.
Few cities have been so fixated on their own symbolism and so proud of their appearance even before preservation and urban historiography became fashionable. And few capitals have had such a complex relationship between their urban core and the court as Vienna. AEIOU is more than a list of vowels in the Roman alphabet, the acronym was used from the 1400s to spell out in Latin or German what is roughly equivalent to ‘Austria Is To Rule the Entire World.’
German Law. While Vienna had a taste of the Imperial court as early as 1278 – the reforms by Rudolph IV, who expanded Stephansdom and founded the University – the early city was governed by the medieval German town law. This was similar to other merchant cities of Central Europe that belonged to the Holy Roman Empire and to Poland and were run under the South German, Lubeck and Neumarkt Magdeburg laws.
Imperial Regulations. In 1526 Ferdinand I laid out comprehensive municipal regulations, assuming direct control over administration of the city and eliminating all self-governing provisions of the German law. Even without this formal change, Vienna’s modest size, muted presence of guilds, and relatively limited trade made its future expansion and metropolitan ambitions vulnerable to the Holy Roman Emperors.
Old Vienna – similar to the pre-Haussmann or pre-Ancien-Regime Paris – is relatively young, when measured by the vintage of its important secular buildings and institutions: the bulk of the built environment of these great European capitals can be traced to the 1600’s but no further. France simply was not unified before then, its state institutions only developed under the Bourbon dynasty during the Grand Siècle – Vienna had to wait until the appeal to broader Christian Europe for help when Jan Sobieski defeated the Turk and lifted the siege in 1683, finally reversing the misfortunes of its geography.
Vienna Had to Rely on Supranational Legitimacy. The court itself was different, ruling – even at its peak – a conglomerate of multiethnic catholic and Latin European lands, united by an overarching supranational idea rather than some shared tribal experience of a nation. Frequently crowned or elected as the Holy Roman Emperors from the late 1200’s – and, continuously, from 1528 (if not from 1438) and until 1806, with the exception a five year period in 1740 – the Habsburgs presided for centuries as Kings of the Romans over much of Europe and beyond. In that capacity, they ruled over nearly all of German-speaking and most of Slavic Europe plus much of Northern and Southern Italy and, most famously, Spain with its colonial possessions from Peru to the Philippines, but not until absorbing the Burgundian (later Spanish) Netherlands and expanding into Bohemia, Silesia and Hungary and, ultimately, Poland and the Balkans. All that expansion was orchestrated by the Habsburgs from a place that later that found itself a relatively remote outpost, outside of the eventual sovereign boundaries of major successor states to the Empire. To assert itself as capital in the face of dynastic policies of leading German princes – in Dresden, Munich, Berlin – who had ambitions and exploited connections beyond the Empire, and to make up for the loss of Silesia, Vienna – or, more precisely, the House of Austria – had to rely on the symbols of unity and supranational power legitimized by its unbreakable bond with the Catholic Church first in their proud and much interpreted motto A.E.I.O.U. and later in its capital’s architectural references. Habsburg domains remained fragmented – only Hungary and Bohemia were kingdoms (Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria added later was a symbolic creation) – and Austria proper was merely a grand duchy, its hinterland wasn’t much of a buffer, and the impact of the court on Vienna fluctuated with the degree of control Habsburg emperors exercised over its lands.
The Siege Played a Role and Led to a Building Boom. During two previous centuries Vienna’s commercial fortunes were compromised by the fall of Constantinople in 1453, by the Turkish sieges since 1529, and by lack of consistent commitment by the court to the city since 1485 (see Hofburg below). This created a vacuum of investment in the city during the Renaissance period, and unlike other Central European cities, Vienna missed almost entirely a particularly fruitful urban development period – this is regrettable since unlike Gothic or Baroque, later condemned as corrupt but since rescued and rehabilitated, Renaissance as a stylistic term was never a subject of criticism and has never been a subject of hostile debate or criticism. The release of pent up demand for co-locating with the Habsburg court led to the gold rush of construction, as aristocratic and royal families from German, Czech, Hungarian and later Polish lands moved to establish their base in Vienna, tilting the balance in the power struggle between the court and the city.
Fortuitous Timing of the Building Boom. By then its relative underinvestment in physical space during prior centuries became an asset, providing a broad mandate for the Italian Baroque, then dominant style in Rome and a favorite at the Vatican and with the Habsburgs whose provided patronage had helped its adoption across Central Europe, to take over in the upgrading, modernization, and expansion of old Vienna on a metropolitan scale. Baroque is not just about ornament and building but applied equally to urban and garden planning and therefore was better suited to the task of transforming the court city into an imperial metropolis. The Italian baroque in Vienna combined with some of the Cartesian rationalism of early French classicism to define the world’s most impressive collection of palatial residences of that period and city’s future style for visual representation of power and its architectural references.
Power Relied on Local Density Not Expansion. The court, while small in relation to its importance, to the city’s size or to the court of the French absolutist rulers, had great symbolic power, drawing like a magnet from a wide area spanning most of the Continent. The decades that followed cemented Vienna’s role of the city as the permanent seat of Europe’s most influential royal families and one of the longest ruling dynasties and a preeminent cultural center of world importance, 3rd largest by population after London and Paris, and jam packed with some of Europe’s richest baroque palaces and richest interiors. Despite this the city itself remained cramped, confined, and sort of old-fashioned past the Napoleonic Wars, Congress of Vienna and well into the Metternich era.
Ringstrasse More Than Made Up For Time Lost. What Vienna missed during Renaissance it made up for during the Empire’s liberal era’s pluralism of the universal historicist style of the Ringstrasse zone: it came with the rusticated facades and spatial proportions of Italian neo-renaissance and with countless highly legible references to neoclassical Greek and Roman revival. The traditionally underrepresented Renaissance style finally joined in during the booming Grunderzeit era and played a role in giving the old Vienna an even more conclusively metropolitan face rivaled only by Paris, and was fully represented in Vienna cityscape by the time Secession and modernism arrived.
The New and the Old in Harmony. Its skyline reflects this staggered legacy well, dominated by vertical landmarks that mark each of the important periods: the gothic Stephansdom cathedral inside the treasured core of the old city signaled the formation of a major medieval town, the baroque Karlskirche just outside the former city walls was brought by the spirit of Vienna’s transformation into a modern metropolis worthy of the Empire after the liberation from the Turkish siege in 1683, and the neo-gothic Rathaus and Votivkirche in their co-axial alignment along Universitatring with Wienerwald and the foothills of the Alps as the backdrop
Unparalleled Centralization Thanks to the Imperial Court and the Siege. Unlike other great capitals where the masses and the elite were happy to migrate to newer districts as the city went through massive expansion in the 19th century, Vienna did not see migration of its aristocracy and even bourgeoisie out of the epicenter, Ringstrasse is as far as they got. The magnetic pull of the court and the artistic life anchored the high nobility, abandoning their garden palaces of the inner suburbs when the summer was over to move a few blocks to their main inner city residences. The urban nouveau riche, unwilling to separate from aristocracy, would follow. In its so far unsurpassed comparison of Vienna to Paris and London, Olsen’s City as a Work of Art sums it up quite well: “By their persistent loyalty to the original City the aristocracy gave Vienna the quality that most distinguishes it from London or Paris: a stable socioeconomic geography, concentrating in the center everything that is fashionable, beautiful, and expensive.”
