Ferstel’s much later University of 1873-4, which stands next door to his church and balances Hansen’s precisely contemporaneous Grecian Parlament (see Chapter 2), is a richly plastic pavilioned composition of generically Renaissance character. It also has a high convex mansard over the central block like those on the New Louvre, a feature echoed on the Justizpalast in the Schmerlingplatz, built by Alexander Wielemans (1843-1911) after the University in 1874-81. So much for the main works of one leading architect of the period. Not all Ferstel’s contemporaries had quite so varied a stylistic repertory, however. In Vienna, as in Paris, one of the most conspicuous and also one of the most successful and original of the new public buildings was the Opera House. This was built in 1861-9 by Van der Nüll & Siccardsburg in a mode quite unrelated to their earlier work at the Arsenal but one not easy to define. The Vienna Opera House is a somewhat simpler and less boldly plastic structure than Garnier’s, both in its generally right-angled massing, with pairs of rectangular wings projecting on each side towards the rear, and in the rather flat, somewhat _François I_ detail. Yet the vast curved roof, actually rather like that over the buildings along the Rue de Rivoli, does give it a distinctly Second Empire air (Plate 74). Less grandly sited than the Paris Opéra, it was none the less balanced across the Opernring by one of the largest and handsomest of Hansen’s private works, the Heinrichshof of 1861-3 (Plate 73B). This had a fine glass-roofed passage through its centre and ranges of flats behind the elaborate Late Renaissance façades. It has unfortunately been demolished since the War to make way for a very poor modern block of offices. Here by the Opera House, as at the Place de l’Opéra in Paris, the Viennese urban achievement of the age was concentrated. The Heinrichshof, with its raised central portion matching the high roof of the Opera House opposite and its corner towers corresponding to the mansarded pavilions of more definitely French-styled blocks of flats, offered a handsomer Austrian equivalent of the Second Empire mode than does the Opera House itself; for the Opera House lacks externally the lushness and bombast characteristic of the period at its most assured, while the auditorium within, re-opened in 1955, is today a much simplified reconstruction by Erich Boltenstern (b. 1896). Yet the masonry exterior of the Opera House is clean and fresh today thanks to Boltenstern’s restoration and, with the great staircase and foyer regilded and refurbished generally, it offers a lighter and more festive vision of the period than do the vast majority of Viennese buildings whose stucco so often badly needs a coat of paint.