Vienna's Ringstraße

A publication celebrating the 150th anniversary of the groundbreaking for Vienna’s Ringstrasse. An unparalleled urban monument: a seminal city landscape shaped by imperial will. When the old seat of Habsburg power was trans­formed into a modern metropolis, the imperial resi­dence assumed unexpected proportions. Beginning in 1860 Emperor Franz Joseph I moved all of the ma­jor political and cultural buildings of the city—from the opera and the theater to the parliament, city hall, university, and even the Kaiserforum—to the area where the old city defenses had once formed a ring around Vienna. The world’s largest construction site at the time, the famous Ringstrasse later became a place where the prosperous middle class established a site for their own building projects, which rivaled those of the court and nobility. This volume brings the “society of the Ringstrasse” to life; it tells the sto­ry of the architects and artists involved in this fasci­nating ensemble and of everyday life behind the façades. Contemporary photographs capture the wealth of this architectural legacy and are shown alongside previously unpublished historical photo­graphs.