Browse Exhibits (3 total)
Architecture and Urban Planning in Fin de Siècle Vienna: Experimentation, Modernization, and Traditionalism
This exhibit explores the stylistic, cultural, and historical forces that shaped architecture and urban planning in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. This project centers on the significant buildings, urban sites, infrastructure development, key architects, the planning of the Ringstrasse, as well as the creation of the Prater park, examining the multiple layers of the city, the built landscape and urban life past, and our present experiences of the city through image, video, sound, and narrative.
This exhibit was created during the Spring 2011 course, "Vienna 1900 and the End of an Empire", an interdisciplinary course in the 360 Degree program, taught by History of Art Professor Christiane Hertel and Professor of German, Imke Meyer of Bryn Mawr College.
We must thank Professors Imke Meyer and Christiane Hertel, Digital Collections Specialist Cheryl Klimaszewski, digital technology assistant Jennifer Lopatin, and our fellow classmates for all of your enthusiasm and guidance through this project, and finally, Bryn Mawr College, for supporting our research both local and abroad.
Coffeehouse Culture
The two critera of a coffeehouse:
1.) The coffee-house or a cafe is a public, mainly catering establishment, which bears this description or a combinaiton thereof.
2.) Coffee is among the drinks served in such an establishment.
[taken from Ulla Heise, Coffee and Coffee Houses, (West Chester: Schiffer Publishing, 1987), 92.]
What do you think of when you hear "coffeehouse?" The most obvious answer of course is...coffee! This exhibit will attempt to investigate the history and socio-cultural impact that coffeehouses have had and still have in Vienna. Whilst it is true that coffeehouse patrons historically could indulge and enjoy a nice cup of "kaffe," these institutions also provided a venue for intellectual discussion, news collections through newspapers, and on a fundamental level, social interaction. This exhibit hopes to illustrate that coffee is not the only item served and provided in the coffeehouse.
Theater in Wien
"The stage represents the most powerful and direct form of art"
-Max Reinhardt
"..The history of European theatre may have been carried out as a history of identity [...] The fundamental theatrical situtation, therefore, always symbolizes the conditio humana, regardless of its different culturally-historically determined forms."
-Erika Fischer-Lichte
What does the term 'theater' mean? Does it encompass only those productions that go up onto the stage, with actors and characters with a grand tradition behind them? Or does it also include those avant-garde off-stage burlesques and variety shows?
'Theater' in Vienna at the turn of the century meant all these things. The stage in 1900 could serve as a study of contrasts, encompassing everything from cabarets to the Austrian dramatic canon.
There is no better way to see this than by looking at the period's playwrights and their works. From Hugo von Hofmannsthal, bred in the bourgeois tradition, to Arthur Schnitzler, who criticized that very tradition while being part of it, to Oskar Kokoschka, who sailed straight off into symbolism and abstraction, theater took on many forms. The playwright's works differ so dramatically from one another, yet still discuss similar themes and concepts - indicative of the issues that dominated Vienna's intellectual climate at this critical time period.