VWW: Baroque Architecture & Meaning

We live in a globalised age where the same architects work all over the world, and cities become less distinctive and local. But we in Vienna are privileged to live in a place with a strong look – Jugendstil, 1920s Gemeindebauten, and most importantly, Baroque. This is very strong city-branding, along with music, food and cafes. So Eugene wants to look at this movement and what it says about our city.
The style was born in Italy, and extended to France (we use the French name for the style, in English) and around Europe, but people like Fischer von Erlach really extended the possibilities, here in central Europe, of a style with movement and poetry. Not all of it looks so tasteful, in modern terms, but it is decadent, colourful and bling bling.

Lasting for 200 years (no fast-fashion then!), Baroque extended out of religion and architecture to music, art, clothes and even a way of living and writing. We are lucky to be able to tour so much of these opulent buildings just within a few hundred metres of Karlskirche.

While Eugene does not often look backwards on his Whoosh tours, so we intend to show with this walk how the style would be very popular with the Kim Kardashian-style influencers of these days. How Christian can a church be, when filled with an explosion of gold? We have recently been successfully using music on the streets as part of our mixed tours, and here, we will listen to relevant Baroque composers. April 2023 marks 300 years of the birth of Fischer v. Erlach.

When you see a large group of people walking together in the centre of our city, most will assume they are tourists, and they will be right. But we find it important that locals do not abandon the middle of town to visitors, but reclaim it, explore it and make it our own. There is so much beauty here which Viennese ignore.

This is the first of a series of architectural moments tours, as part of Vienna Walking Week. Next year: Renaissance Wien.

This tour is a part of Vienna Walking Week, where we try something new in showing residents that they do not need to fly away on summer holidays, to get all those good feelings of travel and escape. Our project has won prizes and been written about in the press, as social innovation and ecological creativity.