Vienna (Architecture Compacts) [Paperback]

With extensive and beautiful illustrations you will be told the history of Vienna through the works that have shaped and decorated it. The text is informative, amusing and entertaining but still serious enough for the scholarly. The real strength of the book, though, lies in it's illustrations. They are lavish and copious and will wow any reader. A must if you've visited and fallen in love with Vienna. And if you've not, this book will make you!

This is the English edition of a work originally published in German. The translation is not one hundred percent perfect, but it is ninety-nine! The book is profusely illustrated in colour. Featuring many photographs specially commissioned for this book, its cover features the well-known `golden cabbage' on top of the Secession Building. But how many would be able to give the name of the building featured on the rear cover? Or on the book's frontispiece? This is part of the value of this beautiful and informative volume, as it opens the eyes to much of the little-known as well as the popular art of Vienna. It is a shame that so many photographs are not page-size, but we cannot have everything!

It is appropriate that the book's cover should show the Secession Building, since the edifice has inscribed on its walls words that proclaim, "To every age its art, to art its freedom". After its introduction, the book is split into six chronological chapters, each written by a different specialist.

The first chapter addresses Viennese art and architecture to the Renaissance. Unfortunately but understandably, this period is covered by only one twelfth of the book. References are made to traces of early structures but the first building to be considered is St Michael's church. The paucity of Renaissance (compared to medieval and baroque) architecture is explained by religious upheavals and the move of the court to Prague.

Chapter two, covering the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opens with twenty paragraphs of history. It is silent on Charles VI's plans for the equivalent of the Escorial at Klosterneuburg, but this is just outside Vienna's boundaries. The Viennese early baroque style is concisely expressed in terms of the Liechtenstein Palace: "the concentration of ornamentation towards the centre, the richly varied design of the deep top cornices, and the rather muted but intricate decoration of the façade." There are large sections devoted to baroque sculpture and painting as well as to the Imperial Treasury housed in the Hofburg. The chapter brings us to Schonbrunn under Maria Theresia.

Architecture alone in the nineteenth century is the subject of chapter three. Again, the chapter commences with a welcoming overview of the period, the first half of which (to 1848) "seems secondary, in terms of architectural history, when compared to the baroque palaces and churches ... and the architecture of the so-called Ringstrasse era." But we soon get down to details with the neo-Gothicisation of the three churches adjacent to the Hofburg. The most renowned Ringstrasse edifices are covered but so too are lesser-known structures such as the gasometers at Simmering. The chapter ends with a view of the Prater's ferris wheel. Chapter four, meanwhile, addresses the art of the same period. Of Viennese Biedermeier, "these pictures are by no means intended to be a portrayal of the `good old days' as they have often been interpreted.

The final two chapters bring architecture, painting, and sculpture up to the present day. There are almost twenty pages devoted to Otto Wagner, and twenty more featuring the work of his disciples. Klimt has fifteen pages, Schiele - who "shatters the ideal of beauty that was still central to Klimt's stylized art" - has ten, and so on. The ensuing years of fascism, both the periods before and during the Nazi era, are covered as is the post-war cultural climate. Of modern artists, the fundamental emphasis is on sensuality and sensitivity to materials, often in the service of almost incommunicable conceptual or meditative themes." Quite! The final pages focus on abstract painting, the Actionists, and ends by bringing the story up to the 1990s. But there is little on artists following traditional paths.

Unfortunately, it is only architecture, painting, and sculpture that are covered by this book, so media such as Augarten porcelain or the designs of Viennese classical furniture do not get a mention. Having said that, there are six pages devoted to the Wiener Werkstatte.

There are some typological errors in the first few pages: the caption to the cover photo states that the Secession Building dates from 1918, and that to Hansen's parliament gives the dates 1774-83. There are some other minor errors that a more judicious editing would have spotted. For example, the text says, "the bronze sculpture `Mark Antony' by Arthur Strasser, but the caption refers to `Anton Strasser' and his `Marcus Aurelius'. And Bellotto was not a Viennese painter, but Venetian!

There is no map, and a Habsburg family tree would have been helpful too, but there is a useful plan of the development of the Hofburg. A bibliography is provided plus indices of names, places and subjects.