12 Revolutionary Buildings to Visit in Vienna

Also known as the Karlskirche, this church is set in open space originally beyond the city walls, and it is one of the landmarks of Vienna. It was built to fulfil a vow made in 1713 by Emperor Charles VI, in recognition of the intercession of St. Charles Borromeo in saving the city from plague. The commission came to Johann Bernard Fischer von Erlach, the favored architect of the Habsburg court in Vienna, and was completed by his son Joseph. The church, completed in 1725, has a grand, symmetrical facade, made especially wide to fulfill its scenic purpose as viewed from the Hofburg, the Royal Palace. The main portico is in a scholarly Corinthian order, its freestanding columns more Neoclassical in style than the Baroque forms of the rest of the building. There are open pavilions at each end of the facade, recalling the termination of Bernini’s colonnade in front of the Basilica of St. Peter. Two freestanding columns in the manner of Trajan’s column in Rome are a unique feature, carrying bas-relief narratives of St. Charles Borromeo’s life, based on reconstructions of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. A complex iconography for the whole church was devised by Karl Gustav Heraeus. The main oval body of the church supports a tall dome, with its long axis toward the high altar. On the skyline of the west front are three figures, with Charity represented by the saint in the center and Faith and Hope on either side. (Alan Powers)

The Burgtheater, or Imperial Court Theater, is one of a group of colossal buildings that define the Viennese Imperial style. Its architects, Karl von Hasenauer and Gottfried Semper, were responsible for a number of landmark buildings constructed during the brief Austro-Hungarian empire, including the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History) and the Naturhistorisches Museum (Natural History Museum), which show a strong Baroque influence. The Baroque style had blossomed in the 17th and 18th centuries, defined by curves, statues, and elaborate columns.

Von Hasenauer earned the title “Freiherr” for his work, which included being the chief architect for the 1873 Vienna World Fair. Although his buildings refer to past styles and use an abundance of motifs, his written work has modern insights and influenced future generations of architects.

The Burgtheater, opened in 1888, took years to complete. It saw extensive rebuilding works after damage during World War II. The theater’s round facade is built to impress. Above the name of the building is a relief of Bacchus, the god of wine, in procession. The building’s use as a space for performing arts is reinforced by busts of writers and statues depicting allegorical figures such as Love as well as the muses of Tragedy and Comedy. The interiors are lavishly decorated with stucco ornament and frescoes by Gustav Klimt, one of the best-known Austrian artists of this period. The Burgtheater is a testament to its time, reflecting the opulence of 19th-century imperial Vienna. (Riikka Kuittinen)

Even from today’s viewpoint, the Secession Building (Secessionhaus) is a bold, ambitious edifice with its open-fretwork cupola of golden laurel leaves and its pared down, regimented facade. This fin de siècle building, completed in 1898, is seen as an icon of the Viennese Secession—an anti-traditionalist group of artists—of which Joseph Olbrich was one of the founding members. With his fellow Secessionists Gustav Klimt, Otto Wagner, and Josef Hoffman, Olbrich looked to contemporary British architects such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh for inspiration. Determined to explore the possibilities of art outside the restrictions of academic tradition, Secessionists hoped to create a new style owing nothing to historical influence.

The ground plan and section of the Secessionhaus reveal the use of simple geometric forms, creating a unified, meditative space that was intended to serve as an “exhibition temple dedicated to the new art.” The motto of the Viennese Secession is carved in gold above the main entrance: “To Every Age, Its Art. To Every Art, Its Freedom.” The tendril-like motif of the Secession is a core part of the facade’s ornamental detailing, and it creates moments of delicacy and poise in the large swaths of white space that dominate the front elevation. In 1902, Klimt painted the Beethoven Frieze at the Secessionhaus, which predates the work he did at another Secession-inspired building, the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, designed by Josef Hoffman. (Abraham Thomas)

A professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, architect Otto Wagner was highly influential for a whole generation of architects. He became famous for a lecture he gave in 1894 in which he advocated that Vienna’s architectural style should be radically renewed and spurn any imitation of Classical architectural styles. In 1883 he was one of the two prizewinners of a competition to reconstruct parts of Vienna’s urban district. He went on to become an adviser for the Vienna Transport Commission and the Commission for the Regulation of the Danube Canal, and was appointed to design the urban-rail network, the Stadtbahn. He designed the bridges and tunnels for the network, as well as the platforms, staircases, and ticket offices of the stations.

Karlsplatz Metro Station is one such station entrance and was opened in 1899. When the rail network changed from the Stadtbahn to the U-Bahn in 1981, the station entrance became defunct. However, the two facing buildings above the ground are still in use. The structures were built using a steel framework with marble slabs mounted on the exterior. Each building has a central curved entrance, flanked by symmetrical walls. Inside each entrance is a glass doorway and the sides of the buildings contain large windows. The green and gold painted metalwork that supports each building is exposed in the functional style that Wagner promoted. But what is most striking is the use of simple, flowing curved lines, gilded metal, and inset panels of decorative floral imagery to create an impressive facade. The buildings are an example of Viennese Jugendstil, a style of Art Nouveau developed from 1897 by members of the Vienna Secession art movement who influenced Wagner. (Carol King)

Derided as “hideous beyond measure” when it was first built, Otto Wagner’s Majolica House marks a pivotal point in the architect’s career. Vienna at the turn of the 20th century was a crucible of artistic experiment, as architects such as Wagner, and his students Joseph Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann, turned away from the eclectic historicism that had marked Viennese architecture. It was in reaction to this that Art Nouveau—which developed as Jugendstil in the German-speaking regions of Europe—came to prominence in Vienna, and the Majolica House, completed in 1899, is Wagner’s best example of this style. Highly decorated, the house takes its name from the majolica tiles that face the building. The wrought ironwork of the first two stories gives way to a facade that is creepered with curving abstract flowers, spreading as if from a stem as they go up to meet lions’ heads, molded in relief beneath the overhanging eaves. The exuberance of the decorative tiles masks the clean modernist lines of the building. This was a radical architectural development at the time, and it would find its own high point in Vienna with the Loos House at Michaelerplatz, built in 1911 by Adolf Loos and denounced as the “house without eyebrows” due to its lack of ornamental stuccowork. Majolica House is one of the earliest examples of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, in which art, architecture, and interior design all conspire to create the perfect whole. (Gemma Tipton)

Adolf Loos was as much a cultural critic as an architect. His 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” became a theoretical manifesto on the Modernist ideal. In it Loos argued that ornament should be eliminated from useful objects; he believed that beauty was in function and structure. Lack of ornament was, to him, a sign of spiritual strength, and excessive embellishment wasted materials and labor in an industrial age. His call for an unadorned style of building was a reaction to the decorative Secessionist movement at the turn of the century.

The Steiner House is one of the most emblematic buildings of European Modernism. Built for the painter Lilly Steiner and completed in 1910, it was constructed in a Viennese suburb where strict planning regulations stipulated that the street front must be only a single story with a dormer window in the roof. The house extends to three stories at the rear, and Loos cleverly used a semicircular, metal, mansard roof to slope smoothly down to meet the second floor on the street facade. Loos’s belief that the exterior of a house is for public consumption is reflected in the sparse, white walls. One of the first private homes to be constructed from reinforced concrete, the Steiner House established Loos as the pre-eminent Modernist architect outside of Vienna. It became a compulsory reference point for other architects for its radical austerity and extreme functionalism, and it is regarded as the first completely modern dwelling. (Justine Sambrook)

When, in 1897, a group of architects and artists, including Otto Wagner, Joseph Olbrich, and Gustav Klimt, founded the Vienna Secession, their aim was to break away from both architectural historicism and from the excessive over-ornamentation that had characterized Art Nouveau’s illogical extremes. This intention did not stop Olbrich from running a frieze of topless dancing girls in relief around the exterior walls of his Secession building of 1897, but nonetheless it was the ideals of the Secession, and Otto Wagner’s own handbook, Modern Architecture (1895), that paved the way for the clean lines and practical nature of Modernist architecture.

Occupying an entire city block, the massive Post Office Savings Bank (Postparkasse) in Vienna is one of the cornerstone buildings in the transition from Classical and Historicist architecture to Modernism. It has ornamentation, including, for example, the cast-aluminum, winged female figures atop the cornices, and there are definite Classical elements to the design (evident from the grand symmetry of the facade), but it was the clean functionality of the architecture that proved highly influential. “Nowhere,” wrote Wagner in his design proposal, “has the slightest sacrifice been made for the benefit of any traditional form.”

Reached via a flight of stairs, the Kassenhalle (main public hall) is an atrium, lit by an enormous, arched, glass skylight above. The floor is made up of glass tiles, dispersing light into the sorting rooms below. Compared with the exuberance of some Secessionist decoration, this building, completed in 1912, is restrained. (Gemma Tipton)

Friedensreich Hundertwasser, a sculptor, painter, and environmentalist, turned to architecture in the 1980s with a series of designs for various buildings including incinerators, train stations, hospitals, housing, and churches. His affection for organic shapes and helices and his strong opposition to what he called the “geometrization” of humankind resulted in his highly recognizable style.

Hundertwasser House, completed in 1986, was one of his first commissions, and it remains one of the most distinguished. Sited in Vienna's Third District, this social-housing apartment building occupies a large portion of an old-town urban block. Most remarkable are the facades, which Hundertwasser broke down into small units, vastly differing in color and texture. The apartments have roof gardens with more than 250 trees, bushes, and plants.

Although the layouts of the 52 apartments remained fairly conventional, Hundertwasser tried to avoid flat floors and straight corridors by introducing what he called “non-regimented irregularities” and deliberately planting “beauty obstacles.” Opposed to traditional architects, he initially decreed that everyone should be able to build as they pleased, taking responsibility for their own space—even if this meant self-made structures would collapse—in the process of acquiring structural knowledge. He later bowed to architects’ expertise in structure and stability, but he thought they should still be subordinate to the resident, who should take over in designing the external skin of a building.

Hundertwasser House is the three-dimensional application of an artist’s paintings, and Hundertwasser would apply this treatment to almost all of his architectural designs, making them highly personal and instantly loved or hated by the observer. (Lars Teichmann)

Like the Museum Moderner Kunst and the Leopold Museum built in 2001 alongside the former King’s Stables off Vienna’s Ringstrasse, Hans Hollein’s Haas House is a gesture against the architectural stagnation of Vienna and a refusal to allow it to become a crumbling museum to the past. Built on the Stephansplatz, the great square that houses the 12th-century Cathedral of St. Stephen, the Haas House, completed in 1990, was initially met with resistance from the local citizens. For centuries, the cathedral was the tallest church in the world, and it not only occupies Vienna’s geographical heart but its emotional heart, too.

However, Hollein, as a native of Vienna, brought an understanding of both the city and its inhabitants to this project that enabled him to create a contemporary building that sits with the past while looking toward the future. The most immediately striking features of the Haas House, an office building that also houses restaurants and shops, are the curved facade and the architect’s use of glass. At street level the potentially stark lines of Postmodernity are relieved by asymmetry and with jutting stone-clad shapes. (Gemma Tipton)

Towering over a low-level business district, the Vienna Twin Tower is a triumph of the slender high rise in a city that prohibited the construction of skyscrapers until the early 1990s. Completed in 2001, it is located in an urban development known as Wienerberg City.

Wienerberg, a brick-making firm, ran a competition to encourage development in the area. The winner was the prolific architect Massimiliano Fuksas, who took on the awesome responsibility of designing a new city skyline. As well as office space, Fuksas’s design included a 10-screen cinema, numerous shops, cafés, and restaurants.

Transparency underpins Fuksas’s design; the skin of the building is made from nonreflecting glass, allowing the public visual access to the inner workings of the building. To gain unrestricted views, the heating and air-conditioning units have been hidden in the ceilings and floors wherever possible. Fuksas wanted this openness to create a connection between Vienna’s inner urban areas and outer green areas.

The towers differ in height; one is 37 floors high and the other 35. Although they are connected by several glass multistory bridges, the two towers intersect at an odd angle, with the result that to a moving viewer below the shape and appearance of the towers appears to change and shift.

Fuksas also provided a master plan for additional infrastructure and social housing around the twin towers. These elegant glass forms symbolize Wienerberg City’s growth as an area of regeneration, and they are a lasting and artistic testament to Fuksas’s philosophy of “less aesthetics, more ethics.” (Jamie Middleton)

In the Viennese district of Simmering, four ornate, brick cylinders survive from an 1890s gasworks. After ceasing operation in 1984, they were abandoned and used for rave parties and movie locations. A first attempt to generate interest in turning them into apartments was unsuccessful due of a lack of transport links. A more complete urban regeneration project was needed, so a new metro extension was built. Different architects were commissioned for each of the four gas holders. These included Jean Nouvel and the Vienna-based practice Coop Himmel(l)au.

Gasometer B by Coop Himmelb(l)au, completed in 2001, is the only one to include a substantial structure outside the cylinder, as well as building within the drum. The tall tower, bent in the middle and standing on slanted legs, was first described as a “back pack,” although later this was changed to a “shield.” There is a connection between the two about halfway up the building via a “sky lobby,” used as a social space by the residents. The outer face is smooth, with continuous bands of horizontal windows. In the base of the gasometer is a multifunctional events hall; the structure also houses offices. A shopping mall connects the new metro station with all four gasometers and the integration of mixed uses has successfully generated a village feeling in the development.

The shape-shifting work of the late Modernist avant-garde rarely interacts with protected historic buildings, but in Gasometer B the result is mutually beneficial. (Florian Heilmeyer)

Wolf D. Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky founded Coop Himmelb(l)au in 1968. Rooftop Remodelling is the project that put the Vienna-based architects on the architectural Deconstructivist map.

The relatively small-scale commission—an office extension brief—came from Schuppich, Sporn, and Winischhofer. Among the client’s requirements was a focus on the central meeting room and the creation of several smaller office units adjacent to this main space. With their construction site 69 feet (21 m) above busy street level, Prix and Swiczinsky decided to go for a radical solution that would make the rooftop space distinctive and unique. The glass-and-steel structure is bare of decoration or color, and resembles a wedge-filled gap, split open by an explosion on the conventional rooftop line of the otherwise Neoclassical building. The fragmented form is visible from the street and creates an amazingly lit and spacious interior. Coop Himmelb(l)au’s Rooftop Remodeling took them to the Museum of Modern Art’s Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition in New York in 1988, the year their project was completed. (Ellie Stathaki)