University of Vienna Main Building
Why is it significant?
In front of you stretches the main building of the University of Vienna, a long Renaissance palace with a raised central entrance and ramps on either side.
Key Facts
| Place | University of Vienna Main Building |
|---|---|
| Address | Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.21310, 16.36030 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna's Ringstrasse: The Grand Boulevard That Replaced the City Walls |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you stretches the main building of the University of Vienna, a long Renaissance palace with a raised central entrance and ramps on either side. If the doors are open, walk through to the great arcaded courtyard: a quiet square lined with busts and plaques of famous professors, a hall of fame in stone.
The university is far older than its home. Duke Rudolf the Fourth founded it in 1365, which makes it the oldest university still operating in today's German-speaking world. This building, by Heinrich von Ferstel, opened in 1884, and the Renaissance style was chosen deliberately: it pointed back to the Italian universities where modern science and humanism were born. Sigmund Freud studied medicine in these institutes, and the physicists Erwin Schrödinger and Kurt Gödel passed through them too.
Then there is the scandal of the ceiling. Around 1900 the university commissioned Gustav Klimt to paint three great allegories for its ceremonial hall: Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence. Instead of noble figures of wisdom, he delivered floating naked bodies, sickness and death, and a condemned man wrapped by a sea monster. Dozens of professors signed a protest, parliament debated it, and Klimt finally returned his fee and took the paintings back.
They were destroyed in May 1945, when retreating German troops set fire to a castle in Lower Austria where they had been stored. Today the ceremonial hall shows black and white reproductions in their place, ghosts of a lost masterpiece.
The arcades have a darker side too. Women were only admitted to study here from 1897, and for years only men were honoured in stone. In the 1930s the university was a centre of violent antisemitism, and after 1938 hundreds of teachers and over two thousand students were driven out, most of them Jewish. Memorials now remember them. Walk north across the little park towards the two lacy spires you have been seeing above the trees.