Church am Steinhof (Kirche am Steinhof)

Church · Penzing (14th)Vienna,Austria

A gilded-domed hospital church on a Vienna hill, every detail settled with the doctors, from the sloping floor to the water spout.

The Church am Steinhof is a hospital church, and every detail in it was settled with the doctors who would bring the congregation in. The floor tilts downhill from the door to the altar, so it could be washed down and the back rows could see. The pews seat four or five and have no sharp corners, because an attendant had to reach anyone in a step. Holy water runs from a spout rather than standing in a basin. Inside, the room is white and bright: marble panels to head height, plain plaster above, and Koloman Moser's glass filling the side walls with colour. Wagner won the competition in 1902 and finished in 1907, at the top of a new asylum of sixty pavilions on the hill outside the city. On the slope below, between 1940 and 1945, that hospital ran a children's ward in which nearly eight hundred children were killed. The pavilions stand empty now; the Wien Museum runs the church and opens it in the warm half of the year.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come in mid to late afternoon — the low sun crosses the west window then and lays Moser's colours over the white marble; the same wall is flat and grey in the morning.
Stop talking and let the room settle — sound hangs here for six seconds or more, so a door closing at the back arrives at the altar as a slow wash and speech is hard to follow.
Look at the tower figures before you go in — Leopold and Severin are seated rather than standing, unusual for patron saints, and the four angels over the door bow their heads.
Pick a sunny day for the climb — the dome only reads as gold in direct light; under cloud it goes a dull brown and the marble front loses its glare.
Say Lemoniberg and a Viennese will know the place — the hilltop carries that nickname, lemon hill, because the gilded dome seen from the streets below looks like half a lemon.

Things to do

1
Find the doors the patients used
Go in and turn round to look at the doors. Men and women were brought in from their own halves of the hospital, through their own entrances. The plain doors set into the side walls were escape routes: anyone in distress could be taken straight out without crossing in front of the congregation.
2
Pick the saint of the mentally ill out of the gold
Go up to the altar wall and read the mosaic: souls climbing towards heaven, with ranks of saints around them. Among them is Dymphna, carrying a sword, the saint people asked for help with mental illness. She is there because of who knelt in this room.
3
Climb the hospital's axis to the door
From the gate at the bottom the main path runs straight uphill between the pavilions, and the church closes the line at the top. Walk it rather than arriving at the summit: everyone in the wards below looked up at this dome. Turn round halfway and the city lies east behind you.