The distinct interest of the two handsome volumes of Wiener Neubauten lies above all in that here Liit- zow records a central aspect of nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban life in a great European city: it was in the splendid apartment buildings (Wohn- hauser) that the new middle class found its suitable lifestyle. This was evident in Vienna as in Paris and Berlin, but not London, where the one-family row house remained the predominant dwelling type. Edinburgh took its cue from London, as did Lyons from Paris, and Budapest and Prague from Vienna. The great apartment houses of early-twentieth-cen- tury Manhattan follow the tradition of Vienna and Paris, and some are even modeled after Viennese and Parisian apartment houses.
The plates included in Wiener Neubauten cover these examples of apartment buildings as well as some of the late (i.e., post-Baroque) palaces of the Austrian aristocracy. These are in the tradition of the Roman and Florentine palaces, but in their neo- Renaissance style they are architecturally quite close to the apartment house buildings in which the bour- geoisie flourished. The palaces and Wohnhauser together were classed as Privatbauten, as contrasted to Monumentalbauten. The same series by the pub- lisher Lehmann, which includes the Wiener Neubauten (the series has no name-it is simply a coherent publishing venture), also included a mag- nificent volume of Wiener Monumentalbauten (1885-1892), containing, among other plates, a set on the Vienna Opera. One of the subscribers was Charles Garnier, architect of the Paris Opera.
However, to return to the Wiener Neubauten, another major point of interest is the fact that almost all major Viennese architects of the time are repre- sented: Hasenauer (co-architect with Semper of the great museums), Friedrich von Schmidt (architect of the Neo-Gothic city hall, the Rathaus), Ferstel (archi- tect of the Votivkirche and Universitat) and Gottfried Semper (though himself not Viennese).
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