The Ringstrasse is not what it seems

Abstract

Heldenplatz and Ringstrasse are sort of twins. While Heldenplatz is an evidently unsolved, problematic case, the Ringstrasse appears at first sight as a perfectly realized, world-renowned piece of urbanism, the Wunderkind that doesn’t even need to be looked at. Yet Heldenplatz is part of the Ringstrasse (actually it was intended as its main element, the Kaiserforum) and so, at least for this reason, the system is not as perfect and defined as it might look. Heldenplatz and Ringstrasse are two parts of the same puzzle, the puzzle of the identity of Vienna: the city that is no more the capital of an empire (where the representative core of that empire has evidently been left unfinished), no more the center of a socialist experiment, no more the jubilant stage for Hitler’s comeback, no more the apparently quiet stage for the spy-game of the Cold War, and yet which still did not embrace its new post ‘89 identity as a fast growing multi-ethnic metropolis.