Building Vienna

2026-07-22

‘All architecture is political,’ claimed the architect Richard Rogers recently. The late Middle Ages, which witnessed incomparable levels of construction by civic and parochial authorities in towns and villages across Europe during a period of extraordinary social and economic change, provide an exceptional example of the political imperatives that drove architectural patronage. One such ‘building boom’ was in Vienna, where ecclesiastical bodies raised vast sums of money to create lasting monuments to their civic sophistication and religious devotion. These important creations took place, however, against a back drop of declining trade, dynastic violence and economic instability. Yet current scholarly approaches remain bounded by a focus on the archaeology, rather than the economics, of building work and an unwillingness to set local or regional trends in a European context. By contrast, this project will not only place at its centre the the social, economic and political conditions of medieval architectural production but also set it, for the first time, in a comparative transnational context. It will take as its subject the extraordinary surviving medieval building accounts available in Vienna's archives, exploring what they can tell us about the complex systems that directed construction and their interaction with contemporary urban politics and socioeconomic change. Its ambition is to explicate the social and political achievements that underpinned Vienna’s spectacular medieval heritage, to demonstrate, for the first time, how the organisation of construction was shaped by national borders, and to unite cutting-edge research by Austrian, German, British and American scholars.

Austria

2026-02-15