Written as bathroom reading for a first time cultural visitor to Vienna, this casual post should help intensify the viewing pleasure while exploring a city that despite being one of Europe’s most visited and jaw-dropping places, remains incomprehensibly underrated as a travel destination. Relative to its potential, it clearly deserves more. Contrary to official visitor stats and despite having so much packed into such a compact space – as much in terms of world-class man-made and natural attractions as Paris – this city just isn’t a mass tourist destination, is not on the tourists’ path of least resistance: to truly appreciate it more reflection and deliberate thought would be required than most would care to expend.
My opinionated and, sometimes directionless, tangents added here and there – an attempt to organize my own mental footnotes accumulated from visits over the years, in no particular order – should help make sense of the city’s topology while filling in an occasional history gap. This underlying commentary attempts to produce a cutaway cross-section of Vienna’s elite place in the European civilization. It is not intended as a guide and not indexed: it can be read starting from any point or section by section in its entirety – you decide. It is long on inspiration, aimed at focusing the visitor’s mind on how much one has missed by procrastinating and postponing this trip. So buckle down for some reading.
On First Impressions. If you are unimpressed at first sight, your first impression is wrong. Fight it. Some cities – like Paris, Vienna, Rome – are worth a closer look and a deeper thought, even if they are good at asserting their identity from the start. Apparent compactness of Vienna is misleading once you weigh it by the caliber, quantity, and quality of cultural content directed at you from all directions.
- Form clearly does not follow function here, it marches a few steps ahead. I am talking about the unity and coherence of different art forms, the genteel intensity of cultural experience, the visual homogeneity and clarity of purpose of the built environment. Measured in these terms, Vienna stands apart from other European capitals – including Paris, everyone’s favorite. No other great capital of the Old World has so much on public display, few have such an exquisite blend of style and nature, and none combines extreme Imperial scale with claustrophobic coziness of some of Europe’s most densely enclosed spaces as comfortably and assertively as Vienna.
- A spike of genius at the turn of every century. Few cities managed to reach the pinnacle of creativity across so many fields as Vienna at the turn of the century – in fact, the turn of every century since the Turkish siege was lifted. In the late 1600’s, when a full-blown palace and garden building boom under Leopold I enabled the city to take the mantle of the capital of baroque from Rome then Turin. In the late 1700’s, when under Maria-Theresia and Joseph II it firmly established itself as the world capital of music. And in the late 1800’s, when under Franz Joseph the unprecedented expansion, liberal reform, and melting pot of ethnic diversity made Vienna the global capital of everything modern – but more on that later.
- An island with no visible signs of sprawl. Vienna is less gritty than other major Western capitals, it is devoid of slums, even at its nondescript and still industrial Eastern edge. Don’t expect hordes of ravers or clubs on every corner, the city is half the size it was at its peak during WWI (3MM then). It is full of young people and energy, and has its edge, you just need to shed Anglo Saxon stereotypes. The city outside its dazzling core claims to be home to Europe’s busiest road (Gurtel, its outer ring road, avoid unless you are headed for retrofitted establishments in the arches of Otto Wagner’s original Standtbahn in Dobblinger Gurtel for a taste of local nightlife) and to Europe’s longest shopping street (Mariahilfestrasse) but these symptoms of a mega city have done little to alter Vienna’s spirit of place. The gravitational pull of the Innere Stadt, unchanged for centuries, has ensured that even the outer reaches of the city have a defined start and end. Even at Vienna’s unattractive Eastern flank, countryside with islands of old industrial zone abruptly disappears and is replaced, no transition and as if with a flip of a switch, with plain but clean cut blocks of the city proper – say what you want about the city limits with its pre-WWI buildings, its apartment blocks of the 1920’s Red Vienna, and its Functionalism of the 1930’s, but the ubiquitous suburban buffer of mediocrity so present elsewhere is nonexistent here.
- Spare yourself this experience and hop on the city-airport train instead – an option unavailable just a few years ago, until Vienna finally expanded its busy but antiquated air transit hub to world class standards. This remarkably efficient, punctual, and comfortable transport link is worthy of comparisons with the gold plated public infrastructure projects of Oslo, Singapore or Hong Kong – a fully connected trip to the city takes 15 minutes, and a trip back lets you check your luggage and get a boarding pass directly from Vienna or Salzburg city centers, CAT tickets sold at any of the U-bahn subway stations, train stations or at the airport. But let me refocus before I completely digress from my main point.
- Don’t discount the picturesque periphery of Vienna’s Western outskirts – the Hietzing villa district to the Southwest or the Dobling neighborhood next to the foothills of the Alps North and West of the center. They stand in contrast to Vienna’s Eastern flank, are more refined and urbane in their garden city appearance and mentality, better integrated with the center than satellite villages formerly on the periphery of most Western capitals – the best possible version of a well-functioning suburb.
- This may be a high class problem, but get ready to encounter interference from public works – central Vienna’s otherwise perfect cityscape tends to be punctuated by ambitious renovation projects around important national anniversaries. Maria Theresia’s 300th birthday – the life and achievement of the first lady of 18th century Europe, the ‘working mother of 16’, and the only female ruler of the immense Habsburg dominions during the dynasty’s 650 year long reign, celebrated at multiple venues across the capital and at palatial abbeys around it from March to November 2017, – was responsible for the latest facelift imposed on the city. Much more about her in the section on the Maria Theresia monument below. And not only: 2017 marks 180th anniversary of Empress Elisabeth, one of the most popular Habsburgs, 265 years of the Schonbrunn summer palace and gardens, and 120 years of the iconic Ferris Wheel in Prater. As a result, many ornate monuments and imposing landmarks were hidden from view – including the baroque Pestsaule on Graben, most of Josefsplatz with its equestrian statue, and the cobblestones on Stephansplatz – another reason not to give in to the first impression but to dig deeper.
- Livable city need not be an oxymoron – and Vienna is living proof, its quality of life/prosperity puts other cities to shame. Thanks in part to its even urban environment and lack of contrasts, its measured pace, its rich cultural institutions – the world’s best funding for theater, music and the arts continues centuries of dynastic patronage – and 300 exhibition venues well integrated into daily life, Vienna has been at the top of global city rankings. Recognized as the World’s Most Livable City and #1 in quality of life by Mercer Consulting every single year from 2009 to 2018 and has consistently ranked global #1 or #2 in quality of life by various publications, including the Monocle in 2015 and 2017 and the Economist in 2005 and from 2011 to 2015. Consider that Neither Paris nor London made it into top 35, St Petersburg – a city Vienna is most commonly compared to – ranked #176 in 2017, Copenhagen – everyone’s favorite – came in at #9, Amsterdam #12, and Oslo #31. Further afield, Singapore – Asia’s top place – was #25; San Francisco – top spot in the US – came in #29; Dubai – the top city in the Middle East – #74. Vienna was recognized as #1 globally for its culture of innovation in 2007-2008 and as the world’s most prosperous city – when considering economics, infrastructure, and environmental sustainability – by UN-Habitat in 2012-2013.
- Outsize contribution to everything modern, from culture to politics. Vienna’s profound influence on Western civilization – a birthplace of fascism, totalitarianism, liberalism, and some of the most important schools of thought of the 20th century – is the best reflection of the elasticity and interrelatedness of its culture. Beyond music and psychoanalysis, the city helped start or propel everything we consider progressive or modern – in architecture, urban planning, and fashion, in technology, economics, sociology, psychology, logical positivism, and modern journalism – pushing into many new fields and influencing existing ones with bold, pioneering avant-garde work we now take for granted. Western liberal economic theory of the 20th century and modern free market economics were a core product of Habsburg Vienna. In its planning and architecture, the city effortlessly overtook its lesser former rivals of prior centuries – Genoa, Turin, Lisbon, and Munich – and arguably its contemporary Imperial peers – London and then Paris – as the metropolis on the bleeding edge of modernity.
- Vienna’s modernity predated the modern times. Nourished by the region’s openness and predisposition to accept Italy’s cultural influence and by its own religious connection with Rome, Vienna was able to ditch the old narrow house of the medieval times in favor of imposing block size dwellings centuries before other Western European capitals. Its Ringstrasse style blazed a stylistic trail for other major European cities, exporting its framework for urban development of the mid- to late-19th century. When Belle Époque was still on its way to reaching its peak in Paris, Vienna was already opening a new chapter on the philosophy of urban development, having become the first among major cities to declare ornament a crime. The shockingly minimalist Loos Haus could not have been more at odds with the ornate entrance into Hofburg’s just across Michaellerplatz or from the monumental Neue Burg extension of the palace on Heldenplatz – even more shocking is the fact that all three were iconic structures were built next to each other around the same time, plus or minus a decade.
- The apartment block was born in old Vienna. That’s right, the idea of communal living – renting – alongside many neighbors under one roof, so alien to the Anglo-Saxon mindset with their obsession with privacy but so inevitable in Manhattan, can be traced to Vienna of a few centuries ago. For the resilience and proliferation of the apartment building, Vienna should really thank its Jewish bankers and industrialists who decided to invest in luxury palaces and rent apartments to others.
- Vienna’s intellectual and social liberalism are truly impressive for what was Europe’s structurally most conservative and traditionalist empire under the continent’s longest ruling dynasty, its longest ruling monarch at its top. What made such dichotomy possible? Its position as the center of a supranational, multilingual empire rather than a national capital. Though still pretty cosmopolitan today, at the time when much of Vienna’s present-day built environment was created, it was an eccentric mixture of nationalities, faiths and worldviews, diverse yet joined together by a common idea, common culture, common language of architecture.
- Of all the museums and art treasures in Vienna, the most impressive is the city itself. This is a tall order – Vienna is home to more world class museum venues and art repositories than any city, other than Paris and Rome, of course. Most of Vienna’s collections rank among the world’s top 3 or 4, most of the major ones are housed in spectacular purpose-built palatial venues offering a highly integrative experience, but many of the top museum are deconsolidated, easily accessed and enjoyed, and come with great cafeterias. But this city itself is a work of art, the ultimate work of art, despite the scars of war – divided into sectors by Allies and the Russians, much like Berlin, it managed to avoid the iron curtain and the post-war partitions – but sad reminders of its loss of 12,000 buildings or one fifth of its entire housing stock to thousands of bombs in 52 air raids during WWII are still visible along stretches of Ringstrasse and lesser streets in the center. Without the Allied bombings, this city would have been a total work of art.
- Contrary to popular belief, and unlike other major Central European cities, Vienna did not escape WWII unscathed – and, sadly, was never reborn and restored fully. Some monuments, like the Schwarzenberg palace, have been rebuilt. Others were not so fortunate – even the Staatsoper, arguably, the closest of all cultural institutions to the Viennese, which came under American bombing at the end of the war and lost its props for 120 operas and its collection of 150,000 costumes, and shortcuts are evident in the simplified and uncharacteristically dull interior of the Opera auditorium, redesigned in the 1950s. Vienna’s spectacular railway stations, its grand department stores, and the National Council chamber of the parliament building were even less fortunate, completely rebuilt in nondescript postwar style. Elsewhere, I would have these rebuilt to their original drawings now, by hand, and with meticulous attention to detail, and would have the appreciative public pay for making Austria great again with a ticket surcharge.
- If buildings can be read, Vienna is an encyclopedia. The main floor on the façade, called ‘piano nobile’ or ‘bel etage’ or ‘nobelstock,’ usually 2nd floor, or 2nd to last floor, or any floor with relatively larger dimensions (higher ceilings, wider bays) or marked by richer detailing (pilasters, columns, balustrades, reliefs, rustication, balconies, all of the above). Keep that in mind as you attempt to read balconies, caryatides, and entablatures on the buildings around you, especially the city and garden baroque palaces of the Leopoldine era, the Ringstrasse civic buildings, residential rent palaces, and inner courtyards. I would look for apartment buildings along arcaded sidewalks just a block behind Universitatsring along the often overlooked axis formed by Vienna’s two highly visible Neo-Gothic monuments, the Rathaus and Votivkirche at Rooseveltplatz, at the start of NW segment of Ringstrasse. Also ubiquitous in Vienna is subtle alignment of monuments as well as domes, pediments, balustrades, sculptured cornices, and other skyline features along multiple axes across existing public spaces of older periods.
- ‘All palaces here were all built by the same guy’ an often heard cliche is only half untrue but does not make them less impressive. People will tell you that most of post siege Vienna palatial residences were all built by same two architects. The names Fischer von Erlach and Johann von Hildebrandt come up a lot during the high baroque Leopoldine development boom, practically in every city residence, garden palais of the high nobility, and even in one of the interior courtyards at Hofburg. During the next boom of the Ringstrasse era, it didn’t get much better – the most elegant building boom was carried out to plans of just a handful of architect shops – names like Gottfried Semper and Theophil von Hansen, Heinrich von Ferstel and August van Siccardsburg, Carl von Hasenauer and Emil von Forster, and Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer repeat themselves across the most important civic and cultural projects all over the city. But don’t let that dilute their quality for you or deter you from exploring further.
- This is Europe’s most sculptural city. London by old European standards is a sprawl, and punches below its mighty weight in architectural terms, without really trying to assert itself among its culturally superior peers on the Continent, with some notable exceptions. Paris pioneered the use of blocks of buildings as building blocks – as a means to control and define empty, negative public space in geometric shapes and regular, regimented terms – and for centuries remained all about sameness of enclosure, uniformity of classical facade elevations, and linear perspectives focused on a monument at the far end of each axis. Vienna’s topology is different from both – it is defined by multidimensionality and multiplicity of angles – and combines operatic grandeur with theatrically detailed, articulated sculpture, which plays a central role, unrivaled anywhere else. Europe’s most three-dimensional city offers particularly rich interplay of space and detail, building and street, palace and garden – be sure it doesn’t get lost on you that all this started with a swamp and a blank sheet of paper – but to appreciate this you will need to go beyond a quick glance and try to recognize the alignment of axes formed by major landmarks, statuary, squares, parks, apartment building portals. Every district of the city and every period convey a consistent level of sculptural excellence rarely achieved in other capitals, Vienna’s open public spaces – courtyards, atriums, stairwells, ecclesiastic and secular interiors – and facades – balconies, cornices, porticos, pediments, niches – are overflowing with monumental sculpture of the highest execution quality and in most noble of materials.
- Plastic quality of the city’s architecture is not a lone beneficiary of Vienna’s ambient environment. It is said that even the most basic stuff of life, like local water, coffee, bread or sausage at a corner Wurstelstand, is of exceptional quality here – local water comes from the Alpine springs, uniquely for European big cities, and probably has more to do with the great taste coffee has here than the discovery of the beans made after the Turkish siege, the intellectual energy of the Viennese cafes, or the prohibitively small size of apartments. And wine is as much a tradition here as beer, and I would say more than beer.
- Not a river city by any stretch of the imagination – don’t look for a sweeping monumental embankment or a panoramic waterfront – in waterfront eye candy this is no Prague, Stockholm, or Paris. Remember that the city is not on the Danube but on the Donaukanal, and turned away from the water, the riverfront it has is uninspiring – limit to the Ring tram ride and focus on everything else. Best way of exploring is on foot (although shared mobility, bike paths, and cabs are functioning). What Vienna lacks in riverbank grandeur it more than makes up in Imperial currency and content, in palaces and gardens, in unmatched cultural riches of its museums and theaters.
- I want to make this clear, Vienna is not German, don’t fall into the trap of superficial cliches. The Holy Roman Empire and then Austria-Hungary had a multicultural past Germany has never been in a position to match or even aspire to approach. Emperors, despite attempts by Maria Theresia and Joseph II to centralize and Germanize their possessions after absorbing sizable and unusually multiethnic parts of Poland, viewed themselves not as Germans but as a dynasty presiding over all ethnicities within their domains. The relationship with Germany was complex: the Habsburg Emperors were first crowned then had their hereditary title rubber stamped by top German electors, and were ultimately weakened by them as self-determination ideas spread from the West first by the Thirty Years War then by the French Revolution. German electors could only become sovereign princes at the expense of the Empire. This pattern repeated itself during Bismark’s unification of Germany under Prussia centuries later, possible only via direct confrontation and defeat of Austria, even if the Habsburgs no longer wore the Romische Kaiser crown. It is no surprise that Vienna itself is far from Teutonic, it is a place where the Germanic, the Latin, and the Slavic worlds overlapped and coexisted for centuries – this mix was later supercharged with Jewish wit and energy – helping secure the city’s legacy at the very top of the world’s cultural hierarchy. Not exactly an experience shared by Germany, it is unique, in a class of its own. Vienna may be clean, functional, and charming, but Germanic efficiency, punctuality and spotlessness are nowhere to be found, it is more dynamic and easygoing – ‘Italians who happen to live on this side of the Alps’ is a the cliche but not entirely out of place. The exactitude that permeates the city’s attitudes towards the arts is very Viennese and still not German. As one of the most catholic cities orchestrated by the most catholic court in Europe with the Spanish etiquette of the family’s senior branch, Vienna is a decidedly southern entity that, along with other Habsburg lands of Central Europe, France and Belgium (Spanish Netherlands), is artistically closer to Latin Europe than to bland practicality of N Germany. The one province in Germany with almost the same ties to catholic tradition and artistic detail is Bavaria, and they too say gruss got there.
- The city celebrates military glories of the Imperial past more than most capitals, dubious record on the battlefield notwithstanding. Don’t be surprised by all the pomp – about half of all conflict on the Continent from the 14th century to WWI was shaped by the rivalry between the French king and the Holy Roman Emperor. Expansion of the House of Austria and Habsburg dominions to Spain, skillfully orchestrated via Burgundy and the Netherlands by way dynastic alliances and intermarriages, added fuel to the fire of centuries-old Franco-Spanish rivalry – right as the religious wars and the upcoming French succession – transition of power from moderate Valois Kings and worldly Medici Queens to absolutist, centripetal, centralizing House of Bourbon – promised to turn a conflict of major dynasties into one between major nations. Many were proxy wars fought by or with allies, often unsuccessfully, but even where initial battles were lost, Austrian archdukes and generals at times assumed command of the broader alliance in decisive battles (Prince Schwarzenberg at Leipzig) or were seen as some of Napoleon’s most formidable opponents on the battlefield (Archduke Carl).
- A case for staying in the city on Sundays. Compensate by exploring the church service scene, surrounded by the beautiful catholic interiors and centuries old artwork. The city is transformed on Sunday mornings (not as much as Rome or Krakow but enough to notice), people dress up, they are driven by a purpose, drawn towards the ring of carillon bells and tower clocks. If you don’t go to the Sunday service, you can always drop in for a classical recital or a concert in a church (if dozens of concert halls and palaces no longer excite you) as well as smaller performances at local venues.
