The Ringstrasse

When the city wall was demolished from 1857, Vienna gained a ring road of monuments: opera, parliament, town hall, university and museums, each in the style that suited its task.

The opera house opened in 1869, and Theophil Hansen’s parliament in the Greek style and Friedrich von Schmidt’s Gothic town hall were completed in the 1880s. The Ringstrasse became the Vienna that the modernists rebelled against.