Volume 33, Number 9 · May 29, 1986
Revolt in Vienna
By Carl E. Schorske
The rapid, confused emergence of modernism in the late nineteenth century as a broad cultural movement self-conscious of its break from history drew architecture into its wake everywhere in Europe. But nowhere more than in Vienna. The reason is not far to seek. It lies in the city's great mid-nineteenth-century redevelopment, the Ringstrasse. There Austrian liberalism, as is the way of triumphant movements, built after 1860 its city on a hill, celebrating in stone its victorious values of rational ethical Recht and refined aesthetic Kultur. The Ringstrasse area was built into the old imperial capital like an Austrian Canberra or Brasilia into the wilderness. In a grand, homogeneous space was concentrated a complex of monumental public buildings—museums, theaters, the houses of constitutional politics, etc.—and palatial apartment buildings to house the elite. Conspicuously missing from this model city-within-a-city was any place for the industrial workers and work life on which the power of its builders largely rested.
Feature, 6331 words
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