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No other building triggered so much controversy as the Loos Haus, finished in 1911. Emperor Franz Joseph thought the functional building ruined the square’s look and had the curtains closed at his Hofburg palace to avoid looking at it. Four floors are covered in green marble but the building’s plain upper floors caused uproar among the architect’s contemporaries. Today it is home to a bank.

Gustav Mahler, the director of the Vienna State Opera from 1897 to 1907, was buried at the Grinzinger Friedhof in 1911. The cemetery is in a peaceful location on the outskirts of the city. Mahler’s simple white gravestone was designed by his friend, the architect and designer Josef Hoffmann.

One of the finest examples of an Art Nouveau-style house was designed by the celebrated architect Otto Wagner in 1898. The house is decorated with colourful floral patterns on glazed tiles – pink roses, green leaves and blue blossoms spread across the building’s weather-resistant surface. The window sills bear matching floral patterns. The house is now divided into apartments with shops on the ground floor.

Maria Theresa (1740–80), known for her strong Catholic beliefs, modernized the empire by introducing many reforms.

Between the Kunsthistorisches and Naturhistorisches Museums is a statue of Empress Maria Theresa (1717–80). The German sculptor Kaspar von Zumbusch created the monument in 1888, presenting the empress on the throne surrounded by ministers and advisors, as well as composers such as Mozart.

After Kärtner Strasse and the Graben, this street is the city’s trendiest and most frequented shopping mile. Hundreds of shops and a few department stores offer fashion, books, music and electronic goods, while cafés, restaurants, ice cream parlours and cinemas abound. The shops are interspersed with two churches, Stiftskirche at the lower end and Mariahilf in the middle.

Am Hof is dominated by the monument to the Virgin Mary that was cast in bronze by Balthasar Herold (1664–7). The base shows four angels fighting four animals which symbolize the four major catastrophes for humankind in the 17th century. The dragon stands for starvation, the lion for war, the fantastical Basilisk, for the plague, while heresy is symbolized by a snake.

Under this Renaissance ruler (1486–1519) all Habsburg lands were united and the arts and sciences flourished.

The Austrian sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka created a monument in 1988–91 to commemorate all those killed during the National Socialist regime and World War II. Separate elements, made of granite from the area of the Mauthausen concentration camp, are arranged on the square where the Philipphof house was situated. The house was destroyed during an air raid on 12 March 1945 and more than 300 people were buried alive in the debris. The monument includes the Austrian Declaration of Independence on the “Stone of the Republic”.

During the construction of a Holocaust memorial by London artist Rachel Whiteread on Judenplatz in 2000, the remains of a medieval synagogue were discovered. Once the centre of a flourishing Jewish community, the synagogue was destroyed in 1420 and its bricks used for building the old university. The excavation site is open to the public and a little museum is dedicated to the life, work and religion of the city’s medieval Jewish community. You can also take a virtual stroll around the 15th-century Jewish quarter.