I always thought I’d love Vienna. You see, I have a terrible secret: I am a bleeding-heart progressive in all ways but one. When it comes to architecture, I have always sided – somewhat shamefully – with more reactionary forces.
I just can’t help it: I hate brutalism, find most new and newish builds awful to look at, and generally believe that most houses designed after, oh, about 1950 are a waste of aesthetic space. It’s a terrible illness and one I usually try not to articulate too often.
It is also why I was thrilled to be going to the Austrian capital for the first time a few weeks ago. I adore Venice and the old medina of Tangier, because walking around them feels like walking around history, and I was hoping Vienna would stir similar feelings.
It’s the city that featured in so many of my history books at school in France; the city where the old Europe lived and died. I was ready to be charmed and overwhelmed by the faded grandeur of it all, yet in the end, I wasn’t. Vienna left me cold.
I walked around, doing my best to ignore the persistent, torrential rain, trying to force myself to feel awe and deference. Those feelings never came. It took me a little while to figure out why; it had felt as disappointing as talking to someone on a dating app for weeks then meeting them and failing to find a spark.
At first, I assumed my expectations had been too high. After a while, I realised Vienna was to blame. The whole point of faded grandeur is that it is faded, and Vienna looks as clean and slick now as I imagine it did at the height of the empire.
I love cities full of old buildings because walking around them means being surrounded by history. It establishes a connection between you and the people who walked down the same streets hundreds of years ago but lived very different lives.
History doesn’t feel like it has passed in Vienna. It’s a place that decided, at some point, to go to war against the passing of time. The buildings look the same now as they did then, nothing has changed, nothing has ever changed, nothing will ever change.
It’s unnatural and inhuman. It’s denying the one thing we cannot and should not escape from – waking up every morning and choosing not to let entropy win. I loathed it. It reminded me of that billionaire burning piles of cash every month in order not to age. His face doesn’t look like the one of a 21-year old; he just looks a bit odd. Vienna isn’t charming; it’s in denial and it feels hollow.
It also reminded me of all those Twitter accounts lobbying for the building of classical houses. You know the ones; we can all guess where they fall on the spectrum. After all, it is mostly MPs on one side arguing for a return to pre-war architecture.
I used to very quietly agree with them – never in public, only ever in my head – and I was a bit ashamed of it. What did it say about me that I kept such bedfellows? Luckily, Vienna has solved this problem for me, once and for all.
Those reactionaries and I may have similar aesthetic tastes, but I understand that some things must be left to decay. I am in favour of keeping our past around so we remember where we came from, and what has happened to us since then; they want to stop time from passing, or at the very least remain in denial about the fact that things will always change. Really, we couldn’t be more different from one another.
They can keep their chocolate box towns; I’ll take tasteless newbuilds surrounded by beautiful, crumbling ruins any day.
