Vienna, the sunset of the old world and the dawn of the new world

Journal title TERRITORIO
Author/s Giovanni Denti
Publishing Year 2011 Issue 2011/58 Language Italian
Pages 6 P. 155-160 File size 633 KB
DOI 10.3280/TR2011-058015
DOI is like a bar code for intellectual property: to have more infomation click here

Below, you can see the article first page

If you want to buy this article in PDF format, you can do it, following the instructions to buy download credits

Article preview

FrancoAngeli is member of Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA), a not-for-profit association which run the CrossRef service enabling links to and from online scholarly content.

The construction of the Viennese Höfe was an epic event: Austrian Marxist theorists like Otto Bauer saw the construction of these large residential complexes as the concrete creation of the ‘New World’, which would give new social and cultural dignity to the working classes which until then had been exploited: ‘the old world’ set against the new world. The difference between the working class neighbourhoods and the bourgeois city was also underlined by the architecture of these new residential complexes: large enclosed courtyards, where collective and cultural functions were concentrated, as in the Karl Marx-Hof, with turrets distributed along façade that gave the image of a fortress constructed around the Ring, symbolically encircling the built-up City of Vienna in the last days of empire. Looking back around ninety years later, the stratification of history has conferred a strongly cohesive character on the different parts of Vienna: as Robert Musil would have said ‘everything has amalgamated’.

Keywords: Red Vienna; Höfe; urban morphology

Giovanni Denti, Vienna, il crepuscolo del mondo di ieri e l’alba del mondo nuovo in "TERRITORIO" 58/2011, pp 155-160, DOI: 10.3280/TR2011-058015