Wien Museum

Museum · Wieden (4th)Vienna,Austria

Vienna's own collection of what it took off its streets, the cathedral's carved figures and fountain statues brought indoors while copies stand outside.

The Wien Museum keeps the things Vienna took off its own streets. The stone figures carved for the south tower of St Stephen's Cathedral are here at eye level, close enough to read the tool marks, while copies stand in their place up on the tower. So are the lead figures Georg Raphael Donner made for the fountain on the Neuer Markt; bronze casts have stood out in that square for a century and a half, and the originals came indoors. Much of the building has that double life — the real thing in here, the stand-in outside. The permanent display climbs three floors in date order around an open hall, where you find a five-and-a-half-metre model of the cathedral, the steel letters off the demolished Südbahnhof station, and a whale from a Prater funfair restaurant. The city founded the museum in 1887, and for seventy years it lived inside the City Hall with no building of its own. Oswald Haerdtl's low block on Karlsplatz opened in 1959, the first new museum in Austria after the Second World War, and a rebuild finished in 2023 added two storeys. The collection passes a million objects, so the seventeen hundred on show are a thin slice.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Go in through the glass pavilion, not the long low block behind it — the glazed entrance was added in the rebuild and stands forward of Haerdtl's 1959 building, facing the square.
Judge Haerdtl's building by the foyer and the staircase — those interiors are protected, while the panels on the front are not his but replacements fitted in a refurbishment in the 1980s.
Look down into the hall from each floor above — the biggest objects could not fit in a room, so they stand in the open middle and you pass them from every height.
Do not look here for the Roman ruins or the flats where Beethoven and Schubert lived — the same museum runs them, but each is a separate building elsewhere in the city.

Things to do

1
Stand close to the faces from the cathedral tower
In the great hall, find the stone figures taken from the corners of St Stephen's south tower. Duke Rudolf IV began that tower and had his own parents and his wife's parents carved for it. Get close to the faces, which were cut to be read from far below.
2
Walk around the lead fountain figures
Circle the Donner fountain figures in the hall and find the young man of the river Traun, leaning out to stab a fish with a trident. Scholars still argue about which fish it is. Then look at the lead close up, where a century of visitors' scratches was toned down rather than removed.
3
Step out on the roof terrace over Karlsplatz
Take the stairs to the terrace floor that sits on top of the 1959 block. Step out onto the open terrace, where the old parapet meets the new steel and glass. Look down on Karlsplatz, the square this museum has faced since it opened, and across to the green copper dome of the Karlskirche.