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When the medieval bastions around the inner city were knocked down at the end of the 19th century and the Ringstrasse was laid out, Theophil von Hansen constructed a building in the Italian Renaissance style in 1872–6 to house Vienna’s art school. The school, founded by Peter Strudel in 1692, moved here from the Strudelhof building on the academy’s completion. The Academy of Fine Arts became internationally famous for its training of painters, sculptors, architects, graphic artists and stage designers. It also houses a gallery of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, 19th-century Austrian works, and a copper etching collection of more than 60,000 prints and drawings (see p44).

In the Hofmobiliendepot (imperial court furniture depot), which was established by Empress Maria Theresa in the late 18th century, all the Habsburgs’ furniture was stored, repaired and kept in a good state to be distributed to imperial households whenever required. Today the museum tells how imperial families used to live and has thousands of exhibits spanning more than five centuries. Among them are curiosities such as Baroque armchairs on wheels, an imperial travel throne, velvet-covered praying stools, Rococo spittoons and toilets disguised as stacks of books. There are also fully furnished rooms on display ranging from Empress Elisabeth’s rustic rooms from the Schönbrunn Meierei and a typical girl’s room as it would have looked in the Biedermeier period.

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.

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.

The focal point of Schiller-platz, the square in front of the Academy of Fine Arts, is the statue of the poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller, sculpted by Johannes Schilling in 1876. Opposite is the Goethe monument, created by Edmund Hellmer in 1900 (see p55) as a tribute to the two great German-language writers.

Emanuel Schikander, a friend of Mozart, had this theatre built between 1798 and 1801 but only one year after its grand opening he went bankrupt and sold the building. The theatre has had a colourful history, changing owners many times, but saw great historic moments with the premiere of Beethoven’s Fidelio in 1805 and Johann Strauss’s operetta Die Fledermaus in 1874. The theatre closed down in 1938 but after World War II it staged state opera performances while the damaged Staatsoper was being repaired. Today it is owned by the City of Vienna and mainly used as a stage for musicals and occasional operas.

Next to the Majolika House is another of Otto Wagner’s Art Nouveau-style buildings. The six-storey house has a white plastered façade with beautiful golden stucco elements. Between the top row of windows are golden medallions with female heads, designed by Wagner’s fellow artist Koloman Moser (1868–1918). Golden palm leaves are spread above the medallions and peacock feathers underneath reach down to the windows below. Above the rounded corner with an iron-and-glass porch are statues of female “callers” by Othmar Schimkowitz (1864–1947). Some of the designs are from Wagner’s students who also became well-known architects, such as Josef Maria Olbrich, the Secession building’s architect.