Vienna tends to get typecast as a periwigged wonderland, full of neoclassical palaces and baroque pomp, but that’s not the whole picture. In the 19th century, the city of Freud and Jung started exploring its experimental side and modern landmarks were built, including Otto Wagner’s beautiful Art Nouveau church at Steinhof, with its gold-plated copper plates, and the golden cabbage of the Secession building, built in 1898 and a hangout for Klimt and friends. The latter caused a lot of controversy, as did later works by my favorite mustachioed early modernist, Alfred Loos. An opponent of needless decoration, he was forced to add window boxes to his pioneering, stripped-down Loos Haus on Michaelerplatz, now a bank.
More fun is the dinky Loos American Bar, which still serves cocktails amid a glorious, geometric assemblage of mahogany, brass, and onyx—while for a glimpse into his domestic designs, the Emil Löwenbach apartment he created in 1913 near the Urania has recently opened for Saturday tours. Any architectural safari of the city should also include Zaha Hadid’s incredible, cantilevered library at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, and Hans Hollein’s postmodern Haas Haus—controversial in the 1980s—which reflects St Stephen’s Cathedral in its glass facade.
But if you only have time for one building, make it the Kunst Haus Wien, created by Friedensreich Hundertwasser in 1991 and recently renovated to make it more sustainable. Like the architect and ecologist’s Hundertwasser House and Village nearby, it resembles architectural crazy paving—a jumble of colored glass, metal, brick, wood, and ceramic tiles, sprouting a biophiliac flurry of plants and shrubs. It features around 260 plant species, including 10 “tree tenants” waving their branches out of the windows.
