Es ist Mein Wille: the Ringstraße

In his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Czech author Milan Kundera creates an abstract dichotomy of beauty. Kundera posits that there are precisely two, mutually exclusive forms of beauty. I wish I had the book on me at the moment, as it is one of my favorites to thumb through, but I was at least able to scavenge this quote from the internet:

"Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it. We've always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That's what enabled western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with with a sudden wondrous poetry."

While much of Vienna's first district is a bastion of Kundera's "beauty by mistake,"Vienna's Ringstraße is a wonderful example of "beauty by design," each detail painstakingly executed by great historicist architects. Amongst these buildings include the Rathaus (city hall) standing in it's Neo-Gothic grandeur and the Universität Wien in the Neo-Renaissance style to hack back to the era's resurgence of learning, just to name two of many. Each of the Ringstraße buildings were built in a historicist style that best reflected the intended purpose of the buildings being constructed. The buildings, although in my opinion very aesthetically pleasing, were not without their flaws. Amongst other complaints, the Rathaus was too poorly lit, and the Parlament has abhorrent acoustics. At the inauguration of the Staatsoper, Emperor Franz Joseph offered harsh criticism that incited the suicide of one of the two architects. Ten weeks later, the other died of tuberculosis, and neither saw the building's completion.

The Ringstraße is the former location of the city wall, constructed in the thirteeth century during a time when it was actually useful to have a giant wall surrounding your city. Outside the city wall was a Glacis, an area free of buildings and vegetation extending approximately 500 meters in every direction. Inside the wall was the inner city, which is now the first district. In 1857 , Emperor Franz Joseph made a decree for the demolition of the city wall with his famous declaration, "Es ist mein Wille" ("It is my will,") marking, to many historians, the beginning of the Gründerzeit, or "founding period," an era of immense economic and industrial growth for Vienna.

The Rathaus