St Stephen's Cathedral
The cathedral stands at the centre of the old city and is older than almost everything around it. A church was consecrated on the site in 1147; the west front, with the Giant's Door and the two Heathen Towers, survives from the Romanesque church of the thirteenth century. The rest is Gothic, begun when Duke Rudolf IV laid the foundation stone in 1359.
The south tower is 136 metres high, was finished in 1433, and makes this the tallest church in Austria. The north tower was meant to match it and never did: work stopped in the sixteenth century and it was capped at 68 metres. The roof is covered with some 230,000 glazed tiles, laid in a zigzag and, on the north side, in the arms of the city and the republic.
In the last days of the Second World War, in April 1945, fire spread to the cathedral from neighbouring buildings and the roof collapsed. It reopened fully in 1952. The great bell, the Pummerin, originally cast in 1711 from captured Ottoman cannon, was destroyed in the fire and recast in 1951; it hangs in the north tower and is rung at New Year.
The south tower is climbed by 343 steps, and the north tower has a lift. Beneath the church are the catacombs, shown by guided tour, where Rudolf IV and other Habsburgs are buried. Mozart was married in the cathedral in 1782, and his funeral was held there in 1791.
Baroque Vienna
The defeat of the Ottoman army outside the walls in 1683 was followed by half a century of building, and the Baroque city is the result. Its leading architects were Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt.
The Karlskirche is the principal church of the period. Emperor Charles VI vowed it during the plague of 1713, to St Charles Borromeo; it was begun by Fischer von Erlach in 1716 and completed by his son in 1737. Its front combines a Greek temple portico with two columns modelled on Trajan's Column in Rome, under an oval dome 72 metres high.
The Belvedere, Schönbrunn and the court library belong to the same decades and are described under the imperial palaces of Vienna.
The Ringstrasse
In December 1857 Franz Joseph ordered the demolition of the city walls and the open ground in front of them. In their place came a boulevard 5.3 kilometres long and 57 metres wide, opened on 1 May 1865 though building along it went on for decades. It is not a full ring: it runs around three sides of the old city, and the fourth is the quay along the Danube Canal.
Each of its public buildings was given the historical style thought to suit its purpose, which is why the street reads as a catalogue:
- The State Opera, 1869, by August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll, in a Renaissance style.
- The Votive Church, 1879, by Heinrich von Ferstel — Gothic, built in thanks for the emperor's survival of an assassination attempt.
- The Parliament, 1883, by Theophil Hansen — Greek, for the birthplace of democracy. It reopened in January 2023 after a renovation lasting five years.
- The City Hall, 1883, by Friedrich von Schmidt — Flemish Gothic, for civic freedom.
- The University, 1884, by Ferstel — Italian Renaissance, for learning.
- The Burgtheater, 1888, by Gottfried Semper and Carl von Hasenauer.
- The two court museums, of natural history and of art history, opened in 1889 and 1891, by the same two architects.
Ordinary tram lines run along it, and no single line makes the whole circuit.
Otto Wagner and the Secession
By the 1890s a younger generation regarded the Ringstrasse as dishonest — modern buildings in borrowed costume. In 1897 a group of artists led by Gustav Klimt left the official artists' association, and the following year built their own exhibition hall, the Secession, designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich: a white cube under a dome of gilded laurel leaves, with the motto "To every age its art, to art its freedom" over the door. Klimt's Beethoven Frieze of 1902 is in the basement.
Otto Wagner, the senior architect of the movement, held that nothing that was not practical could be beautiful. His main works can all be seen:
- the Stadtbahn stations of the city railway, of which the two pavilions on Karlsplatz, of 1898, are the best known;
- the Majolica House on the Linke Wienzeile, of 1898–99, an apartment building faced in flowered tiles;
- the Postal Savings Bank, built in two stages between 1904 and 1912, with a banking hall of glass and aluminium;
- the Church at Steinhof, of 1904–07, built for a psychiatric hospital on the western edge of the city and open in the summer months.
Adolf Loos went further. His commercial building on Michaelerplatz, of 1909–11, faced the Hofburg with upper storeys that had no ornament at all, and caused a scandal; building work was halted by the authorities until he agreed to add window boxes.
Red Vienna
Between 1919 and 1934 the city was governed by the Social Democrats, who financed a housing programme from a tax on luxuries and built more than 60,000 flats in large estates with their own laundries, kindergartens and clinics. The city has gone on building since, and owns some 220,000 flats, which makes it one of the largest landlords in Europe.
The best-known estate is the Karl-Marx-Hof in the nineteenth district, built between 1927 and 1930 by Karl Ehn, a pupil of Wagner. It is more than a kilometre long. It was shelled by the army during the civil war of February 1934. One of its former wash-houses holds a museum of the period.
Hundertwasser
The Hundertwasserhaus, in the third district, was built between 1983 and 1985 to the ideas of the painter Friedensreich Hundertwasser: uneven floors, irregular windows, bright colour and trees growing from the rooms. It is municipal housing and people live in it, so it can be seen only from the street. The Kunst Haus Wien, a few minutes away, was designed by him as a museum and is open. He also redesigned the exterior of the district heating plant at Spittelau, visible from underground lines U4 and U6.
Since 1945
The Haas House of 1990, by Hans Hollein, puts a curved glass front directly opposite the cathedral, and was as disputed when it opened as Loos's building had been. The four brick Gasometers in the eleventh district, built in the 1890s to store town gas, were converted to flats and shops between 1999 and 2001. Across the Danube, the DC Tower of 2014 is the tallest building in Austria, at 250 metres, beside the United Nations complex of 1979.