Vienna Ringstrasse — Parliament at Night
152.80 £
Vienna’s Ringstrasse Parliament building photographed at night — the Greek Revival temple facade with its Athena fountain and ramp flanked by reclining river figures, fully illuminated against the winter night sky.
Description
The Austrian Parliament Building on the Ringstrasse — designed by Theophil Hansen and completed in 1883 — is the most rigorous exercise in Greek Revival architecture in Central Europe: a programme of historical legitimisation for the new constitutional monarchy that adopted the Greek democratic architectural vocabulary as a political statement. The Athena-Pallas fountain at the building’s entrance — the goddess of wisdom presiding over Austria’s legislative process — is one of Vienna’s most accomplished pieces of public sculpture. The Ringstrasse’s uniform gas-to-electric street lighting, originally designed to create the most impressive nocturnal boulevard in Europe, still illuminates the Parliament building from below in a warm amber that gives the Greek Revival white limestone a quality of golden warmth absent in daylight. This photograph was made at 9pm in January — the Vienna winter evening when the Parliament’s seasonal lighting installation is most dramatic.
