So something today would be described as an investment property in a top location: “Apartment house in Neu-Lerchenfeld, 3 floors, 7 windows at the front, courtyard fountain, 2 side wings, 32 apartments, area 156 square fathoms, interest 6000 guilders, price 58,000 guilders”. Anyone who responded quickly to this Vienna newspaper advertisement from 1880 could make their fortune in the urban expansion area west of the historic center. The property alone, measuring the equivalent of 560 square meters, was worth its weight in gold, and the factor by which the annual rent of 6,000 guilders had to be multiplied in order to reach the sales price of 58,000 guilders was just ten times that amount – whereas today’s real estate transfers are usually only at that start at thirty times the annual rent.
The unique architectural flowering of the Belle Époque in Vienna was not only reflected in the magnificent houses on the Ringstrasse, where the founders, speculators and parvenus from the heyday of economic liberalism carried out their stone self-portrayal. At the same time, they worked on creating a modern housing and real estate market with new apartment buildings outside the old city center. In their opulent illustrated book “The Viennese Interest House”, the three Viennese art historians Marion Krammer, Andreas Nierhaus and Margarethe Szeless describe this building boom not only from a purely art and architectural historical perspective, but also from an economic and social historical perspective.
The most beautiful apartment building in the world
While a total of 690 residential palaces were built on the five-kilometer-long ring road, which was built on the demolished ramparts from 1857 until 1914, the new buildings in the surrounding expansion areas number in the thousands. Their builders not only strived for representation, but also sought to secure their future in real estate investments due to the lack of a developed insurance and capital market. This rise of private landowners began after the French Revolution established the civil right to private property and the upheavals of 1848 marked the end of landlordism.
The book not only presents architectural stars such as Ludwig Förster and Otto Wagner as pioneers, but also unknown Viennese such as Anton Ölzelt, who rose from a humble background to become an Austrian construction tycoon. With a feeling for promising locations, from 1850 onwards he bought new building plots outside the old district using credit, waited for the city to grow back, then put the houses together as “group buildings” with continuous facades to form ensembles and thus created the model for the Ringstrasse palaces.
The Viennese preferred to set up coffee houses
A few years later, the building contractor Heinrich Drasche, owner of the Wienerberger Ziegelwerke, built his masterpiece based on this model, the colossal Heinrichshof opposite the State Opera; This design by Theophil Hansen, the architect of the Vienna Parliament, was considered “the most beautiful apartment building in the world” until it was demolished in 1954. The trick in all new buildings was the transfer of the aristocratic palace scheme with gable-crowned central projections, corner towers and sculpturally overloaded decorative facades to residential buildings.
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