I love cities and buildings and walking around and exploring. My friends are often interested in theatre, art or music, and that makes sense, but for me walking is usually enough. It’s both the seeing and the anticipation that come from it that are engaging, even if I don’t look into anything too deeply.
Wandering aimlessly can limit me to a city center or the same places that everyone else visits. Or it can lead to wandering in uninteresting places, because it is great to walk without a plan, but sometimes it is to nothing worthwhile. The usual solution is guide books, but I have had guidebook vacations and would prefer to reach for something more.
Following are some of my walks in Vienna, those that I have planned, the places I have stopped and references to what I have read. This is a post in progress. If you have opened it early, there may be only one. But come back; there will be more. I am spending some time here.
Piarist Square, Josefstadt district, April 2023
For Vienna I have the internet and two books: Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siecle Vienna–we read it in his class at Princeton in the 1970’s–and Vienna Art and Architecture, an edited volume by several authors published in 2008.
For architecture, Schorske focuses on Vienna’s late 19th century redevelopment, specifically the Ringstrasse, a wide boulevard that surrounds old Vienna, and on its contemporary critics, Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner. According to Schorske, Sitte was a theorist who admired craftsmanship but disliked the traffic-oriented Ring and its free floating buildings, which lacked human scale. He preferred the intimacy and the community of the older city, specifically the square, and his favorite, the Piarist Square, whose church façade was renovated by his father, and where he attended the gymnasium.
So on a Saturday afternoon I decided to have a look at the square and the church. Getting there began with a ride on the U6 metro line, an elevated stretch of the old Stadtbahn, which runs in the center of Vienna’s highly-trafficked Gürtel, or Beltway. The Gürtel encloses the Innere Stadt (the Inner City), the Ring and much, but not all pre-World War I Vienna. Like the Ring, the Gürtel replaced a line of outer fortifications in the late 19th century. Here is a map: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wiener_G%C3%BCrtel_Stra%C3%9Fe_Karte.png
The Stadtbahn was designed by the Otto Wagner, the antithesis of Sitte, a modernist, but my focus was on getting to the Piarist Square. I have been on this metro line many times, typically to go to the Stadthallenbad swimming pool and frequently I notice the beauty of its viaduct structure and stations, and in particular the emphasis on glass and light. Whatever Wagner’s modernist and functionalist theory, he was also creative in the use of ornament, fusing and simplifying traditional detail in service of something that was entirely new.
the metro station at Josephstädter Strasse
stairs at the metro station, Josefstädter Strasse
After leaving the station, I crossed the Gürtel, to Josefstadter Strasse, which initially looked like a plain city street, and then I hopped on a streetcar that was heading in the wrong direction, but for just one stop. I got off and walked to Piarist Square, through a neighborhood of handsome 19th century buildings and attractive shops and restaurants.
Piarist Square
Piarist Square
Piarist Square, the fourth side
The Piarist church has an appealing baroque façade, but the square surprised me. It was raining when I arrived, and it was almost silent; perhaps due to the weather or the season it was not the gathering place I had imagined. The square is formed by the church façade, framed by two lower buildings with plain façades, acting as wings on either side. Over one ornamented doorway, the term “Gymnasium” signals the teaching vocation of the Piarists and a much more active square on weekdays. The two wings or arms reach to a relatively narrow street, where more conventional 19th century buildings form the square’s fourth side.
the church and to its right, the Gymnasium
This was not at all what I had expected. I had thought instead of a busier place, of the kind I see frequently in Europe, with more traffic and shops. Of course, I had not seen the square on a school day, or on a clear day when the café is open, nor do I know what it looked like in the late 19th century, but my vision of Sitte’s ideal was now one of quiet removal, rather than of a square that is at the center of things.
the stage entrance of the Josefstadt Theater
Josefstadter Strasse: a supermarket sign on an unusual facade
I turned again towards Josefstadter Strasse, passing the stage entrance of the Josefstadt Theater, where Beethoven and Wagner conducted and which is now the oldest theater in continual use in Vienna. (I’ve checked its website and see that the current performances are theater, not music. They include the German language premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt.) On Josefstadter Strasse there were other visual treats, including an old apothecary shop and a “Living Art” store, Wohn-Art-Wien, displaying furnishings from the early 20th century.
Wohn Art
Wohn Art
I noted also the sober, handsome “Institute for Advanced Studies”, a social and economic research center founded in the early 1960’s by émigré Austrian academics, with the support of the Ford Foundation and the Austrian government. From the street a 19th century addition is visible, to what was originally an 18th century palace. And like the Piarist square it thas three sides facing the street, but narrower and closed off by a gate.
the Institute for Advanced Studiesa facade on Josefstadter Strasse
I noticed this extraordinary modernist facade, walking to the square and then again on my way back. Around the corner from another extraordinary facade, on the Handlesakademie II der Wiener Kaufmannschaft (Commercial Academy II of Vienna’s Merchant) which has its origins in 1857. This is one of several locations of is now called the Vienna Business School, since 1997.
Handlesakademie II der Wiener Kaufmannschaft
Hamerling Park
The school faces Hamerling Park, built on the site of the Josefstadt barracks, which were demolished in 1910. Robert Hamerling was an Austrian poet.
My walks in Vienna
I love cities and buildings and walking around and exploring. My friends are often interested in theatre, art or music, and that makes sense, but for me walking is usually enough. It’s both the seeing and the anticipation that come from it that are engaging, even if I don’t look into anything too deeply.
Wandering aimlessly can limit me to a city center or the same places that everyone else visits. Or it can lead to wandering in uninteresting places, because it is great to walk without a plan, but sometimes it is to nothing worthwhile. The usual solution is guide books, but I have had guidebook vacations and would prefer to reach for something more.
Following are some of my walks in Vienna, those that I have planned, the places I have stopped and references to what I have read. This is a post in progress. If you have opened it early, there may be only one. But come back; there will be more. I am spending some time here.
Piarist Square, Josefstadt district, April 2023
For Vienna I have the internet and two books: Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siecle Vienna–we read it in his class at Princeton in the 1970’s–and Vienna Art and Architecture, an edited volume by several authors published in 2008.
For architecture, Schorske focuses on Vienna’s late 19th century redevelopment, specifically the Ringstrasse, a wide boulevard that surrounds old Vienna, and on its contemporary critics, Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner. According to Schorske, Sitte was a theorist who admired craftsmanship but disliked the traffic-oriented Ring and its free floating buildings, which lacked human scale. He preferred the intimacy and the community of the older city, specifically the square, and his favorite, the Piarist Square, whose church façade was renovated by his father, and where he attended the gymnasium.
So on a Saturday afternoon I decided to have a look at the square and the church. Getting there began with a ride on the U6 metro line, an elevated stretch of the old Stadtbahn, which runs in the center of Vienna’s highly-trafficked Gürtel, or Beltway. The Gürtel encloses the Innere Stadt (the Inner City), the Ring and much, but not all pre-World War I Vienna. Like the Ring, the Gürtel replaced a line of outer fortifications in the late 19th century. Here is a map: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wiener_G%C3%BCrtel_Stra%C3%9Fe_Karte.png
The Stadtbahn was designed by the Otto Wagner, the antithesis of Sitte, a modernist, but my focus was on getting to the Piarist Square. I have been on this metro line many times, typically to go to the Stadthallenbad swimming pool and frequently I notice the beauty of its viaduct structure and stations, and in particular the emphasis on glass and light. Whatever Wagner’s modernist and functionalist theory, he was also creative in the use of ornament, fusing and simplifying traditional detail in service of something that was entirely new.
After leaving the station, I crossed the Gürtel, to Josefstadter Strasse, which initially looked like a plain city street, and then I hopped on a streetcar that was heading in the wrong direction, but for just one stop. I got off and walked to Piarist Square, through a neighborhood of handsome 19th century buildings and attractive shops and restaurants.
The Piarist church has an appealing baroque façade, but the square surprised me. It was raining when I arrived, and it was almost silent; perhaps due to the weather or the season it was not the gathering place I had imagined. The square is formed by the church façade, framed by two lower buildings with plain façades, acting as wings on either side. Over one ornamented doorway, the term “Gymnasium” signals the teaching vocation of the Piarists and a much more active square on weekdays. The two wings or arms reach to a relatively narrow street, where more conventional 19th century buildings form the square’s fourth side.
This was not at all what I had expected. I had thought instead of a busier place, of the kind I see frequently in Europe, with more traffic and shops. Of course, I had not seen the square on a school day, or on a clear day when the café is open, nor do I know what it looked like in the late 19th century, but my vision of Sitte’s ideal was now one of quiet removal, rather than of a square that is at the center of things.
I turned again towards Josefstadter Strasse, passing the stage entrance of the Josefstadt Theater, where Beethoven and Wagner conducted and which is now the oldest theater in continual use in Vienna. (I’ve checked its website and see that the current performances are theater, not music. They include the German language premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt.) On Josefstadter Strasse there were other visual treats, including an old apothecary shop and a “Living Art” store, Wohn-Art-Wien, displaying furnishings from the early 20th century.
I noted also the sober, handsome “Institute for Advanced Studies”, a social and economic research center founded in the early 1960’s by émigré Austrian academics, with the support of the Ford Foundation and the Austrian government. From the street a 19th century addition is visible, to what was originally an 18th century palace. And like the Piarist square it thas three sides facing the street, but narrower and closed off by a gate.
I noticed this extraordinary modernist facade, walking to the square and then again on my way back. Around the corner from another extraordinary facade, on the Handlesakademie II der Wiener Kaufmannschaft (Commercial Academy II of Vienna’s Merchant) which has its origins in 1857. This is one of several locations of is now called the Vienna Business School, since 1997.
The school faces Hamerling Park, built on the site of the Josefstadt barracks, which were demolished in 1910. Robert Hamerling was an Austrian poet.