CitiesAustria
On 20 December 1857 Franz Joseph signed away Vienna's city walls. Demolition started the following March, and the ring of open ground the fortifications had occupied was filled instead with a parliament, an opera house, two identical museums, a university and a town hall, finished in 1913. It was a capital dressing itself for an empire of fifty million. That empire lasted another five years. Vienna has been a slightly oversized city ever since.
The boulevard built on the footprint of the demolished walls, and the reason Vienna's monumental buildings all sit in a circle rather than a centre. Each was built in a different historical style chosen to suit its function: Gothic for the town hall, Greek for parliament, Renaissance for the university. The styles are arguments about what each institution was supposed to be.
The Gothic cathedral at the actual centre, its south tower's unfinished twin visible as a stump on the north side, work having stopped in the sixteenth century. The roof tiles form a patterned eagle. It burned on 12 April 1945 and the roof came down, so the vaulting you look up at is reconstruction rather than medieval survival.
The winter palace, expanded by successive Habsburgs over six centuries so that it reads less as a building than as an accumulation. It now holds the president's offices, several museums and the Spanish Riding School. The sprawl is the point: each ruler added a wing rather than replacing what stood, so the complex is a physical family record.
The summer palace out west, with 1,441 rooms and formal gardens rising to a hilltop colonnade. Maria Theresa made it the centre of court life. The detail worth having: the Gloriette at the top of the hill is a folly with no purpose beyond terminating the view, built partly from stone salvaged from a demolished castle.
The imperial art collection, in a building deliberately matched to the natural history museum facing it across a square, the two designed as a mirrored pair. It holds the largest Bruegel collection anywhere. The symmetry is the imperial statement: art and science given identical buildings and equal weight.
The opera house of 1869, whose architects were savaged publicly for it, one dying before it opened. It was gutted by bombing in 1945 and rebuilt by 1955, reopening as a signal that the country was back. Standing places are sold cheaply on the day, which is the only genuinely affordable seat in Viennese high culture.
The central cemetery, larger by graves than the living population of many Austrian towns, with a section of honorary graves holding Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Strauss. Mozart has a monument here and is not under it: he was buried in an unmarked communal grave elsewhere in the city and the exact spot is unknown.
The long market strung out along a covered stretch of the River Wien, selling produce at one end and increasingly serving lunch at the other. The river underneath is the reason the market is the shape it is. What began as a place to buy vegetables has drifted steadily toward being a place to eat them.
The 1898 exhibition hall built by artists who had walked out of the establishment, topped with a gilded dome of laurel leaves that Viennese wits immediately nicknamed the golden cabbage. Its motto is carved over the door: to every age its art, to art its freedom. Klimt's Beethoven Frieze is in the basement.
A baroque church of the 1710s fronted by two enormous free-standing columns carved with spiralling reliefs, borrowed straight from Trajan's Column in Rome. It was built as a plague votive. The columns are the tell: an emperor asserting that Vienna was the legitimate heir to imperial Rome, in stone, on a church.
Vienna knocked down its own walls and built a ring of monuments on the gap.
Franz Joseph signed the demolition decree on 20 December 1857 and work began in March 1858. The fortifications had been militarily useless since Napoleon breached them in 1809 and were mainly obstructing traffic. The Ringstrasse that replaced them was finished in 1913.
The empire's grand new capital had five years left to run.
The Ringstrasse project completed in 1913. Austria-Hungary collapsed in 1918, leaving a city built for the administration of fifty million people serving a country of a few million. Vienna has been architecturally too big for itself ever since.
Mozart has a monument in Vienna's central cemetery and nobody knows where he is.
He was buried in an unmarked communal grave at St Marx in 1791, in line with the burial regulations of the time rather than out of poverty. The exact location was never recorded. The Zentralfriedhof memorial is a cenotaph among genuine composers' graves.
Vienna's two great museums are the same building twice.
The Kunsthistorisches and Naturhistorisches Museums face each other across a square as deliberate mirror images, built to identical designs. The message was that imperial art and imperial science deserved exactly equal housing, and neither could be seen to outrank the other.
Vienna's cathedral burned down because of looters, not bombs.
On 12 April 1945, as Soviet troops entered the city, civilians looting nearby shops set fires. The wind carried them to Stephansdom, the roof collapsed and the vaulting went with it. What visitors look up at is reconstruction, and no air raid was involved.
The Secession's golden dome has been called a cabbage since the day it went up.
The 1898 building, put up by artists who had quit the official establishment, carries a gilded dome of laurel leaves. Viennese wits named it the golden cabbage almost immediately, and the nickname has outlasted every argument about the movement itself.
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