NowVienna

Architecture

Architecture in Vienna

Vienna's modern architecture began as an argument about ornament conducted a few streets from the imperial palace, and the buildings on both sides of it survive. The city has been careful about what it adds since.

• Wien Museum

  ·

  Completed 2023

  Certov, Winkler + Ruck

  An extension to the city museum on Karlsplatz, built over the 1959 original. Certov, Winkler + Ruck lifted a new floor clear of the old roof on a recessed storey, so the addition reads as a separate block hovering rather than as a raised parapet. The original building by Oswald Haerdtl was restored beneath it and left legible. The museum roughly doubled without changing the proportions of the square.

• Hundertwasserhaus

  ·

  Completed 1985

  Friedensreich Hundertwasser · Josef Krawina

  A municipal housing block in Landstraße, built from a painter's model. Friedensreich Hundertwasser required uneven floors, irregular windows and trees planted in rooms with their branches out the openings, and the architects Josef Krawina and Peter Pelikan worked out how to build it. No two windows on the elevation are alike. It is social housing designed as a refusal of the straight line, and the tenants pay ordinary municipal rents.

• Österreichische Postsparkasse

  ·

  Completed 1912

  Otto Wagner

  A savings bank on Georg-Coch-Platz. Otto Wagner clad the facade in thin marble panels fixed with visible aluminium bolts, which announces the stone as a skin rather than a wall. The banking hall is roofed in glass and floored in glass block, so daylight passes through the room into the basement. Aluminium is used throughout at a moment when it was still a new material for building.

• Looshaus

  ·

  Completed 1911

  Adolf Loos

  A commercial and residential building facing the imperial palace on Michaelerplatz. Adolf Loos gave the shop floors green marble columns and left the residential floors above completely plain, with unframed windows and no ornament. The bare upper facade was read as an insult to the palace opposite and construction was halted. Loos added flower boxes under the windows to end the dispute, and they are still there.

• Secession Building

  ·

  Completed 1898

  Joseph Maria Olbrich

  An exhibition hall built by artists who had walked out of the academy. Joseph Maria Olbrich made it a plain white block under a dome of gilded laurel leaves, with the group's motto cut over the door. The internal walls were movable so each exhibition could be given its own plan. It was built as a manifesto and is one of the few that stayed a working building.