Fifty Fifty

A museum building as a witness to history: in 1959 the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna (Wien Museum), designed by Oswald Haerdtl, opened on Karlsplatz in Vienna. It remained for many decades the only new building in Austria built specifically as a museum. Haerdtl’s interior design reflects a high quality; the sober building itself, however, always remained controversial. It stands as an example of the reserved modernism that was typical of post-war reconstruction: reliability over risk; assimilation over radicalism. The cultural climate was repressive; political consensus was the guiding principle. 

Fifty years later: this anniversary year, the museum is showing works by twenty-three artists, among them ten site-specific works developed especially for the exhibition. They correspond in various ways with the 1950s: some refer to the architecture, design, and rigid atmosphere of the Haerdtl building; others more generally with the aesthetic-political climate of the postwar period. 

Art throughout the museum: the works form a course through three floors of the building. The roof and outside areas are stages as well as the foyer, atrium, staircase, and former administration office. A museum building that, after fifty years, hardly meets the spatial and functional demands of a contemporary museum, is transformed, commentated, and disrupt