Vienna Streets

Wandering around the streets of Vienna, you are constantly encountering the grandiose and the floridly overdecorated facades of the large imperial buildings.

Part of the Hofburg Palace:

The Neo-Gothic town hall:

The Neo-Classical Parliament with all its statues:

Put them together:

The imperial figures:

But, if you look harder you can see some more interesting newer architecture from the turn of the century, including this work by Adolf Loos, the Loos House, famous for its lack of window decorations.  (In fact, he was required to add the window boxes to appease civic indignation about the lack of proper decoration.)

Otto Wagner's work is the most famous from this era, including his S-Bahn station:

And his postal savings bank:

Details:

I saw it on Sunday, so unfortunately I did not get a chance to go inside.


Other buildings and facades seen on my walks:

I saw a few decorative representations of workers:

 And some peculiar things:

This is one of Vienna's flak towers, built during WW2 and virtually impossible to tear down.   This one has been repurposed as an aquarium, and adorned with the commissioned conceptual art seen in this picture.

This is the library of the technical university, and these are apparently owl sculptures.   Meaning wisdom?  

This looks like a building in Tokyo:

And this was the view looking up from the narrow street next to our apartment: 

Eventually, I started to revert to old habits, and suddenly red, yellow, and blue appeared, even in Vienna:

And the old and the new, and a red, yellow, and blue?

Vienna Churches

Vienna, unsurprisingly, has a large number of churches.  For the most part, they are baroque churches, with very theatrical and over-the-top decorations.   We saw quite a few of them.   The most famous is the Stephansdom, which dates back to the 12th century. It is on a square which is the focal point for the entire city.   Like Notre Dame in Paris, it is usually mobbed with tourists.  And like most older cathedrals, it has various parts finished and unfinished that were added at various times.  It does have a wonderful Gothic interior, but lacks the original stained glass windows that were destroyed in WW2.   Though I kind of liked the 1950's style windows.

And the light from the windows:

The Karlskirche was constructed in the 18th century, and is about as Baroque as you can get.   It has two columns in front modeled on Trajan's in Rome.

Unfortunately, the interior had a large scaffolding in place that is being used for restorations.
Looking up:

As always, there is extraordinary marble:

Eventually, I got tired of trying to avoid the scaffolding in the pictures, and went with the flow:

And here is Otto Wagner's Karlsplatz S-Bahn station, with the Karlskirche in background.
So things didn't change that much in 200 years:

Another exceptional church was the Jesuit Church, just down the block from where we were staying.   Again there were elaborate marble concoctions, and in this case a trompe l'oeil ceiling, which became more or less convincing depending on where you stood.

No square inch left unadorned:

The ceiling, with the troupe l'oeil dome:

Undulating columns:

And for all you organ fans out there, there was a very modest organ:

Sometimes I think about all the extravagant decoration that went into these churches. and the time, money, and craftsmanship that went into their creation.    It's certainly not something that I can imagine happening in the present day.  Take, for example, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Upper West Side of New York.  No one imagines that it will ever be finished, not in a world where people are suffering from lack of food and shelter.  The church has even sold off part of the land of the church to help keep the church going.