Strudlhofstiege
Why is it significant?
Stand at the foot of the staircase on the Liechtensteinstraße and follow it with your eyes as it climbs: ramps that split and meet again, curved balustrades, lanterns on slender posts, and a little fountain in the middle. This is the Strudlhofstiege, finished in 1910.
Key Facts
| Place | Strudlhofstiege |
|---|---|
| Address | Strudlhofstiege, Liechtensteinstraße, 1090 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.22230, 16.35840 |
| Part of Walk | Couches, Wax and Radium: Freud's Vienna and the Medical Quarter of Alsergrund |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the foot of the staircase on the Liechtensteinstraße and follow it with your eyes as it climbs: ramps that split and meet again, curved balustrades, lanterns on slender posts, and a little fountain in the middle. This is the Strudlhofstiege, finished in 1910.
It solves a simple problem with great elegance. The ground here drops sharply from the higher streets to the old riverside level, and people needed a way down. The city architect Johann Theodor Jaksch turned a set of steps into a piece of theatre, with landings where you can pause, look, and be seen. The climb takes less than a minute, but the design makes you want to slow down and turn around halfway to admire the view.
The name comes from much earlier. Around 1700, the court painter Peter Strudel owned an estate on this slope, and he ran a private art school in his house. That school is counted among the beginnings of Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts. So painting students drew from life on this hillside long before anyone built a staircase.
The stairs became famous in 1951, when Heimito von Doderer published his novel The Strudlhof Steps. It is a long, winding book about Viennese lives before and after the First World War, and the staircase is the place where its characters keep meeting, missing each other and changing their fates. Doderer himself was a complicated figure, an early member of the Nazi party who later broke with it, and that shadow is part of his story too.
For the scientists of this quarter, these stairs were simply the daily commute. Physicists, doctors and students climbed them on their way between the institutes and the hospital. So do the same: climb to the top, and turn left into the Boltzmanngasse, a street named after a physicist. The plain building at number 3 changed what we know about the atom.