After Paris the most extensive and sumptuous example of the re-organization of a great city carried out in this period is not in Italy but in Austria. Vienna had been relatively inactive architecturally in the first half of the nineteenth century under Francis I (see Chapter 2). His successor Francis Joseph, however, who came to the throne in 1848, set out in the following decades as _Kaiser_ and _König_ to see that his Imperial and Royal capitals should rival Napoleon III’s Paris. In 1857 the fortifications surrounding the old city of Vienna were removed, and the following year Ludwig Förster (1797-1863) won the competition for the layout of the Ringstrasse that was to take their place. The execution of this project, with many modifications, took some thirty years (Plate 74). Outside the actual walls there had been a wide glacis, and therefore the Ring could be developed not merely as a series of wide tree-lined boulevards like those of Paris but with large open spaces in which major public buildings were grouped. These edifices are even more various in style than the comparable ones in Paris, despite the fact that they were the work of a very closely knit group of architects. None of them is of specifically Second Empire character, though the high mansards and the pavilion composition of the New Louvre were used fairly frequently on private buildings in Vienna and throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The earliest major project of Francis Joseph was the construction of the Arsenal, begun in 1849, where most of the leading architects of the period worked (see Chapter 2). All in various versions of the _Rundbogenstil_, this group of buildings culminates in the centrally placed Army Museum of 1856-77 by Förster and his Danish son-in-law Theophil von Hansen (1813-91). On this the very ornate detail is Byzantinesque and Saracenic in inspiration, yet it is not without a distinctive flavour that is unmistakably of this particular period: the brilliant polychromy of the red and yellow brick walls almost seems to echo, like Vaudoyer’s Marseilles cathedral, the bolder effects of the contemporary High Victorian Gothic architects of England. Ferstel’s bank in the Herrengasse of 1856-60, also _Rundbogenstil_, has been mentioned earlier. The North Railway Station of 1858-65 by Theodor Hoffmann was _Rundbogenstil_ of an even more ornate sort, with only a rather modest iron-and-glass-roofed shed set between its two massive masonry blocks. This was badly damaged by bombing in the last War but not totally destroyed. On the other hand, the South Station, built in 1869-73 by Wilhelm Flattich (1826-1900), a pupil of Leins in Stuttgart, was of rather conventional High Renaissance character.