Vienna, one traveller’s experience

 

The Vienna Natural History Museum, viewed from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, with the statue to Maria Theresa between them. Lots of people in the shade, not so many in the full sunlight.

Vienna is famous as one of the great examples of 19th-century urban planning. The Ringstrasse (which Wikipedia baldly translates as “ring road”, although it is hardly that) was built around the historic city, using the space created by the removal of the city walls from 1857. The planners seized the opportunity to build a large number of trophy buildings, all of monumental scale, using a wild variety of styles, including Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque, to celebrate the Habsburg Empire. They include the University of Vienna, the Opera House, the Town Hall, and the Parliament Building. The Ringstrasse is generally accepted as quite an exceptional development: for example, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

This holiday, my first visit to Vienna, was based almost entirely around or within the Ringstrasse, so it did not look at any of the social housing for which Vienna is famous. The story of how the Ringstrasse was built, and funded, has been well told by several historians, notably Carl Schorske (1979).

My experience in the centre of Vienna was uncomfortable, and the Ringstrasse didn’t help. It was mid-summer, and the temperature was up to 30 degrees Celsius, in other words, hot. This was not the best weather to be looking at the outside of buildings. The Ringstrasse buildings, in all their grandeur, had to be approached in full sun with no convenient shade available.

Vienna is a city that takes its culture very seriously, so my heart sank initially at the thought of a space dedicated to multiple museums. Anyone who has approached the Kunsthistorisches Museum will recognise the deliberately overwhelming impression produced by the gigantic-scale architecture. Inside and out, the building is designed to intimidate you.

The view from the foyer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum: you can see where the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge got its ideas from.

Was this kind of grandeur ever enjoyed by the users? The Ringstrasse buildings are similar to the superhuman scale of Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris. A walk down the Champs-Elysées is not a pleasant experience, in a similar fashion. Both the Ringstrasse and the Champs-Elysées are major traffic thoroughfares. They are noisy and smelly, and do not please the eye for pedestrians, who enjoy things to look at on a small scale.

The Museums Quarter during the day

In contrast, the Museums Quarter, despite its name, is relatively small and enclosed. It is a space created to one side of the Ringstrasse, creating a square (small by the standards of the Ringstrasse itself), with a museum at each end: the Leopold Museum at one end, and MUMOK, the Museum of Contemporary Art, at the other. There are several other institutions around, such as an Architectural Institution, but they are barely visible from the main square. In the square itself there is a variety of open-air cafes, and, most importantly, both mature and young trees and plants. You can pay to sit at cafes, but there are also seats where you can just sit for free. The cafes are very relaxed, providing anything from a drink to a full meal, of many different cuisines: the café we went to provided anything from Chinese to Japanese to Italian, with several styles in between). In the evening, people walked their dog, or went out with their families, and I noticed that rarity, single people dining in the cafes, unnoticed.

The Museums Quarter in the evening: modern art, several cafes, loungers for anyone to sit.

The Museums Quarter provided a central-Vienna equivalent to some of the smaller streets, which, even if not traffic-free, had lots of street cafes and planting, with a speed limit of 10 km/h. During the day, there was quite a bit of traffic in these side streets, but in the evenings, many street cafes opened up, using a part of the carriageway, and the road surface had been changed to a tiled brick, to slow the traffic down.

One of the side streets away from the Ringstrasse. This is a road that cars could use - but few cars were seen in the evenings.

To my mind, this is what a pleasant city is all about. It’s rare in London, because there are so few traffic-free locations (don’t even think about using a London square for social events, for the most part). I love art galleries, and the opera, and grand buildings, but the Museums Quarter showed how it was possible to combine grandeur and small-scale.