Thirty-Eight: Vienna Succession (10-24-2022)
Today, back in Rome. Yesterday, an early morning cab ride with an English-illiterate driver to VIE. A few days before, a reluctant BCN to VIE flight. It's profoundly difficult to board a plane knowing you're leaving a Mediterranean climate for the cold emptiness of central Europe. Vienna as a choice for a destination is unusual for a contemporary Architecture loving budget traveler, and it undeniably leaves much to be desired. However, after seeing plenty of construction tarps and lackadaisical road crews in Barcelona slowly transforming its signature superblock neighborhoods into pedestrian and cycle friendly streets, Vienna was a relieving site of a city post-cycling transition. It was admittedly irresistible to rent a bike and tour the city, even if the biggest Loos, Wagner, and Klimt icons are within a short (cold) walk of one another. Vienna is a cold, beautiful city that, despite its lesser population of party-hungry internationals in comparison to lively Barcelona, sells to the foreign (American) traveler a better lifestyle.
The biggest barrier of entry to Viennese culture is its dreariness. Vienna lacks trees, color, and fauna. Cold, unwelcoming concrete canyons are ubiquitous outside of the Museum District, where the perfectly trimmed inter-museum gardens become icy deserts even at noon, when the sun barely rises halfway up the sky. There is ennui to Vienna, a stark contrast between finely ornamented apartment villas, clean, orderly garden-parks, and the large population of young families and hyper-wealthy urbanites. The cold is penetrating even when it barely drops to freezing at night, because it is so unfriendly and relief is unaided by passively-designed antique buildings. Chinese tourists here appear as steppe nomads rather than bourgeoisie metropolitans. Transplants from the Arab world look much more reluctant here than in the sunny Mediterranean states. Despite this- there is an attractiveness beyond the fine ornament and carefully aged vanity of Vienna.
Long ago, I was tantalized by architecture publications long forgotten of German, Austrian, and other central European architectural efforts. These humorless, occasionally joyless, perfectly simple realizations of function and little else, contemporarily obliged to abandon any detail beyond the detail of absence of detail, existed in incredible opposition to the standard American construction I was familiar with. A young me only knew the American greats, Wright, the Empire State Building, and the cookie-cutter catalog of American suburbia. Walls meeting floors must be trimmed, crowned at the ceiling. A facade is a careful face of window, door, window under window, window, window, adjoined with a garage and entry announced by superficial columns. Seeing these late twentieth and early twenty-first century manifestations of central European angst and gloom in the medium of hearthly home formed the basis of my interest in architecture. How can a building that is only in service of comfort and safety be so bleak and dreary while still facilitating comfort? Perhaps, the cold unwelcomeness of these works is why I cannot remember a single one of them beyond the ultimately indescribable impression they left on me. Perhaps, the ability of design in the built environment to overcome the cultural, societal, internal and external unfriendliness of a people to produce a livable and desirable work is only demonstrated in place like Vienna. Perhaps that is why Looshaus was so hated, and why I didn't even notice the grand neo-classical building it faces on my first visit.