MuseumsQuartier

Museum · Museumsplatz (7th)Vienna,Austria

The Habsburgs' imperial stables in Vienna, now two art museums and a courtyard the city sits in on movable loungers.

The MuseumsQuartier occupies the Habsburgs' imperial stables, a long Baroque range by Fischer von Erlach built for the court's horses and carriages. Two museums stand behind the historic front: the Leopold, a cube of white shell limestone, and MUMOK, in dark grey basalt, Austria's museum of modern and contemporary art. Around them are an exhibition hall, an architecture centre, a children's museum and a dance house. The part locals use is the courtyard. It is furnished with the Enzis, chunky modular loungers that people drag into the sun and sit on for hours, and it works as a public living room for students, office workers and families. By the late twentieth century the range had been a trade-fair hall nobody knew what to do with. The conversion opened in 2001, two hundred and eighty-eight years after work started on the stables. Beyond the two big museums the old range is let out under the name Q21 to about sixty small tenants: studios, magazines, galleries, publishers and festivals.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The exhibition hall owns nothing — Kunsthalle Wien keeps no collection of its own, so whatever is hanging there is a temporary show and will not be there on a second visit.
The Baroque front hides all of it — the two modern blocks sit inside the old stable courtyard, so from Museumsplatz you see only the long stable front and none of the new work.
The courtyards never close — they are public ground and stay open around the clock, so the place goes on working as a square long after the museums have shut.

Things to do

1
Sit on an Enzi and stay put
Take a coffee or a beer out into the main courtyard and claim a lounger. Nobody checks anything, nobody asks what you are doing there and nobody moves you along. On a warm evening several hundred people are out on them at once, and none of it depends on the museums being open.
2
Go down into the black basalt block
MUMOK is the dark grey cube, faced in basalt on its walls, its roof and the floor of its atrium. Three exhibition floors sit above ground and three below, around an atrium thirty-five metres high, so seeing the collection means going down as much as up. The top floor keeps a panorama window over the city centre.
3
Give an hour to the architecture centre
The Architekturzentrum Wien holds the country's largest collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Austrian architecture, and its permanent display puts models, drawings, furniture, fabrics, documents and films out in the open. It runs from Red Vienna through the school-building experiments of the late 1960s to the Vorarlberg builders. The seven sections are set up as questions rather than as a national success story.