Wotruba Church

Church · Liesing (23rd)Vienna,Austria

A Vienna church heaped from 152 leaning concrete blocks, its only windows the irregular gaps left between them.

The Wotruba Church is a heap of concrete blocks that turns out to be a church. The sculptor Fritz Wotruba set out 152 of them, from pieces under two tonnes to slabs of 141 tonnes and one block over thirteen metres tall, leaning and overlapping as if the stack had been left half finished. There are no windows in the usual sense: plain glass is set into the irregular gaps between blocks, so daylight arrives in slabs and wedges that cross each other and move through the day. Fritz Gerhard Mayr drew the plans that made it stand up. Building ran from August 1974 to October 1976, and Wotruba died in August 1975, so he never saw it whole. The concrete is bare inside and out, unpainted and unclad, and the room is small enough that the weight above you is the main thing you feel. It is still a parish church, with a hall underneath it, and from the slope outside the whole of Vienna lies below you.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Check the opening hours before you set out — The interior opens a few hours a week, in practice around weekend services, and the journey from the centre takes nearly an hour.
The slope outside is open even when the door is locked — The hillside gives you the whole city below at any hour, so a shut door does not waste the trip.
This is a working parish church, not a sculpture park — Services take priority over visitors, and people come here to pray in a building that the rest of the world treats as an art object.

Things to do

1
Sit through the light for half an hour
Take a seat inside and stay put. The wedges of daylight coming through the gaps travel across the concrete fast enough to see, and edges that were sharp when you sat down go soft. Nothing else in the building moves, which is exactly why the movement registers.
2
Trace the load with your eyes
Start at one corner of the outside and follow which block rests on which. Some sit on a single edge, some bridge two others. Wotruba worked this out as sculpture rather than structure, and Mayr made it stand. Working out the order of the stack takes ten minutes and is the best game the building offers.
3
Step downhill until the church reads as an outcrop
Walk down the slope a short way and turn round so the church is above you with Vienna behind. From here it reads as a ruin or an outcrop rather than a building, which is the impression Wotruba wanted, and the city on the plain gives you the distance to see it.