Over the last 12 days I've had great times in Vienna, Prague, Leipzig, and now Berlin, where I'll be for the rest of this week. Human Transit has taken the bulk of my blogging time, and even so it still hasn't gotten out of Vienna. So I expect this blog will get briefer, sharper shards of impression, easily laid down in the minutes to spare.
So apart from the joy and kindness of Art Nouveau, Vienna might be reduced to this. The disturbing uniformity of the average 19th century street, as though imperial and bourgeois impulses, on their opposite trajectories, can coexist only if we pretend to be a little boring:
The over-the-topness of the late 19th century Hapsburgs, explained by the usual narrative about greatest-decadence-just-before-the-fall, all of which is also, frankly, a little boring:
The particular Hapsburg habit of building things that are just too big for their site, as though the buildings had swelled in place and might soon explode and hurt someone.
The charming and harmless Friedenreich Hundertwasser cult, expressed not just in his wildly touristed house:
... but also in a piece of industrial architecture, part of the works a municipal utility, that tourists aren't told about, and only discover if they're curious about that tower that's not in the guidebook ...
The relief at encountering a living cultural space, something whose current life was more interesting than its inevitable original function as an expression of someone's power. Here Vienna's crowning achievement is the Museum Quarter, an adaptation of what was once the royal stables, now a lively collection of eclectic small museums anchored by two major museums devoted to art since 1900. Its large courtyard features simple but endearing yellow furnishings that draw people from all over the city for the sheer pleasure of lounging in them.
It's the only space I've seen in Europe that seems to do what Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square or Melbourne's Federation Square do -- namely to feel like the whole city's livingroom, focused yet casual.
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What else? Well, some of the Hapsburg pageantry does contain human experience after all. In the end, I identified most with these two characters, near the bottom of one of those grand Baroque cascades of (literally) petrified humanity.
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