-
Wiener Schnitzel
As promised, here’s the epilogue to my 10 days away from Riva…
Tuesday morning, we wake up in Stuttgart like pissed off zombies after staying up past 5am to watch the idiot Hokies lose to Kellen Moore. I was angry, but not as angry as I’d be if I was back in Blacksburg, or as angry as I’d be if we ended up losing the next game to JMU……………………………..
So after a miserable 7 hours of driving, we arrived in cloudy Vienna. It was a bit chilly there. Great news for a 4 night stay when I only packed one pair of jeans and one hoodie (whoops). Things were looking pretty grim, but shortly after check in, we met with Virginia Tech professor Hans Rott. Like Obi Wan with angel wings, he blessed us with knowledge and happiness. He was born in Vienna during WWII, and studied architecture there before coming to the states and earning his Bachelors at Rice and Masters at VT. I can’t imagine a better tour guide for a city I knew so little about. Around almost every corner, he would dish out stories about the place in, for lack of a better term, such a grandpa voice that it made whatever he said seem charming. But let’s get down to it.
Our first stop was the Catholic Church of Christ designed by Heinz Tesar. Super modern and pretty provocative. I chose to do some analytical drawings on this building for the two week period we’re on before our next trip. It adheres to a simple order with a little bit of tweaking in appropriate places, so I’m going to explore that more in the drawings. We moved on and saw a mixed used building by the Austrian firm, Coop Himmelblau, called Schlachthausgasse. The wise man (Hans) guided us a bit further to Otto Wagner’s Postal Savings Bank.
During our tour of the city, I’d say we learned more about it’s history than about its buildings. That doesn’t make it any less worthwhile to see, because it relates the buildings to contexts that demand a specific style or quality that we always read about in school. So before I get any wordier, here’s some more pictures…
St. Stephans Cathedral
Haas-Haus
Zentralsparkassenfiliale Favoritenstrasse (old bank/current art exhibit/recording studio)
BURR
Peering down over the scaffolding at Karlskirche
Prunskaal (library)
Belvedere Gardens and Museum
Nußdorf weir
Stift Klosterneunberg (monastery and museum)
See these ice cubes, see these Ice creams? No joke, they had “Blackys” on this side and “Noggers” on the other… If you don’t believe me, check Flickr.
Lastly, the Kirche Zur Heiligsten Dreifaltigkeit.
Vienna has quite a range of architectural style, with anything from the Baroque churches and Imperial buildings of the early 17th century, the evolving showcases of technology and function during the Industrial Revolution, the post WWI and WWII modernist buildings, all the way through to the stuff everyones doing today. It was fun to see it all in one place. There was so much to see and learn. It’s good to be back now though, focusing most of my energy on these new drawings. I’ll be hanging out in and around Riva for a couple weeks until I’m off for Oktoberfest the weekend of the 24th. Prost!
