MuseumsQuartier & the Imperial Stables
Why is it significant?
Stand in the big courtyard of the MuseumsQuartier and turn slowly around: a long baroque front behind you, a white limestone cube on one side, a dark grey block on the other, and people stretched out on huge plastic loungers as if this were a beach.
Key Facts
| Place | MuseumsQuartier & the Imperial Stables |
|---|---|
| Address | Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.20320, 16.35930 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna's Ringstrasse: The Grand Boulevard That Replaced the City Walls |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in the big courtyard of the MuseumsQuartier and turn slowly around: a long baroque front behind you, a white limestone cube on one side, a dark grey block on the other, and people stretched out on huge plastic loungers as if this were a beach. Two and a half centuries of Vienna are arguing in one square... and the argument started with horses.
This was the imperial court stables, the Hofstallungen, planned by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and built from the 1720s under his son. Its front runs for roughly 350 metres, and behind it lived hundreds of horses, with carriages, grooms, harness rooms and riding halls. In the eighteenth century it stood outside the city, looking across an empty strip of grass towards the walls.
That empty strip is the key to this whole walk. After the Ottoman siege of 1683, Vienna kept its walls and a wide glacis in front of them, a field of fire where nothing could be built. By the 1850s the walls were useless against modern artillery and a corset for a city of around half a million people. On 20 December 1857 the young Emperor Franz Joseph signed a decree that began with the words Es ist Mein Wille... it is My will... and ordered them torn down.
In their place came the Ringstrasse, a boulevard about five kilometres long and some 57 metres wide, opened with a ceremony on 1 May 1865. Building plots were sold to bankers, industrialists and aristocrats, and the money helped pay for museums, a parliament, a university and theatres. Historians call the result the Ringstrasse style: every public building dressed in the historical costume its builders thought it deserved.
The stables themselves became a museum district in 2001. The white cube is the Leopold Museum, which holds the world's largest collection of Egon Schiele, the young painter who scandalised this city around 1910 and died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 at just 28. Now walk out through the main gate, cross the road, and step into the garden between two palaces that look like twins.