Building Vienna

SV: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Michael Viktor Schwarz | Researcher: Dr. Gabriel Byng | HI: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, Horizon 2020
Duration: 2020-2022

In towns across Europe, the late Middle Ages were characterised by economic, social and political instability, waves of plague, disrupted trade, dynastic conflict – and architectural creations of a magnificent scale and quantity. This project takes an exceptional case study of this late-medieval paradox, Vienna, using an approach driven by both contemporary political theory and a comparative, transnational perspective. From the end of the fourteenth century nearly every church in Vienna was extended, embellished or rebuilt, including the vast Stephansdom, despite – or perhaps because of – the city’s dwindling exports and its civic instability. The conditions that made such a combination possible, or even inevitable, are, of course, unique to Vienna but the city’s historical experience had similarities and differences with places across the continent that shed vital new light on not only how but also why this paradox took place – and, conceptually, on how scholars can model the relationship between socio-political change and cultural production.

This project is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, funded as part of Horizon 2020.