Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
Hansen’s Musikvereinsgebäude of 1867-9 in the Dumbagasse is academic in
an almost eighteenth-century way, both as regards the general
organization of the exterior and the restraint of the detailing. In his
still later Parlament of 1873-83, as has been noted earlier, he produced
the last grandiose monument of the Greek Revival. More characteristic,
however, is his contemporaneous Academy of Fine Arts of 1872-6 in the
Schillerplatz. This is externally in the Renaissance mode that he
presumably preferred after he left Athens, but it has Grecian detailing
inside of a delicacy and elegance that recalls the thirties. Especially
handsome is the colonnaded Aula in the centre, even though its rich
painted ceiling of 1875-80 by Anselm Feuerbach is inappropriately
Baroque in a rather Rubens-like way.
Another Austrian architect besides Ferstel was using Gothic for
prominent Viennese edifices in this period (see also Chapter 11). After
Ferstel’s Votivkirche the next Neo-Gothic structure was the Academische
Gymnasium in the Beethovenplatz; this was built in 1863-6 by Friedrich
von Schmidt (1825-91), who had worked earlier under Zwirner on the
restoration and completion of Cologne Cathedral. But the school was soon
outshone in size and in elaboration by Schmidt’s Rathaus of 1872-83.
This stands between Hansen’s Parlament and Ferstel’s University but in a
line with the Reichstrasse at their rear. The Vienna Rathaus is
certainly not unrelated to G. G. Scott’s Victorian Gothic and that of
Waterhouse in England, particularly in the side wings that end,
eclectically enough, in high-mansarded pavilions. But the general
fussiness of the turreted front recalls rather pre-Puginian Gothic, say
Porden’s Eaton Hall of seventy years earlier (see Chapters 6 and 10).
Despite the total visual unlikeness of the Rathaus to its Grecian
neighbour, the Parlament, both have a similarly obsolete air. It is as
if Francis Joseph’s presumptive intention in the fifties of outbuilding
Napoleon III had been succeeded by a belated and rather provincial
desire to outrival the larger structures in other countries in the two
leading modes of the previous period, the Greek Revival and the Gothic
Revival, neither much represented hitherto in Vienna.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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