When thinking about the “face“ of Vienna, one may initially have its famous historical buildings in mind.
Tourists, residents, everybody seems to love all those richly decorated facades, painted all bright white or in the famed “Schönbrunn Yellow.”
Many of these buildings today are renovated and the considered the picture perfect ideal of urban living in Vienna. The high, bright rooms, the Fin de siècle atmosphere, the stucco and scrollwork. It seems poor Adolf Loos was wrong in the end.
But sometimes this picturesque cityscape is disturbed: by a missing building, by a modern, out of place facade, by the odd graffiti tags.
You can often find as the city changes the shades and remains of demolished buildings on the wall of the neighbouring house.
You can see the dirty backyard of a house, no longer hidden behind a building.
Or the wall paint and installations that used to be inside a flat – now irritating on an exterior wall.
You can discover old letters and inscriptions of undertakings on firewalls that haven’t existed in years.
Behind their veneer, a wall holds so much history in this city. A missing chunk of plaster can reveal rusty metal inlays, bricks and stones stacked clumsily upon each other. One can see how they were laid over 100 years ago.
Or you can study the surface of a modern façade – the materials used nowadays and imagine how that wall will look in 100 years – provided it will still be standing.
The moments where the immaculate has been disturbed, when some unplanned interruption tears a hole in the city’s glossy image, are the most interesting “faces” of this city to me.
These photographs are moments of short everyday expeditions around the corners, behind the facades and in the walls of Vienna.
The end.
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