Our friend Otto Wagner, the host of a magnificent field they like to call „architecture“ (which is only its outward expression) used to be a celebrity in this city.
But during the so-called pandemic, when some friends of ours have forgotten their good manners and started plaguing the humans, his small Museum on the „Karlsplatz“ has been closed for too long.
And so it was vandalized by youngsters who were not allowed to party for too long.
Yet we used various hands to show the Otto-Field that we care.
As one body we walked to the building site of the „Wien Museum“ to witness the human rhythms of urban change. Bare brick skeletons were greeting us.
The site has changed profoundly since our last visit.
Isn’t it strange, how our friends, the plants, are so often kept in such tiny, ugly concrete habitats in this city they call Vienna?
After an amazing trip to Schwarzenbergplatz, back to Karlsplatz, along the cruelly abandoned theatre in the Künstlerhaus some powerful building company has closed up as if it were a garage we slipped through a fastfood Restaurant to land where in non-pandemic times you could take a trip underground in honour of Orson Welles’ movie on post War Spy Vienna „The Third Man“.
Some of our hosts tried to feel the vibrations of the sub-urban spaces through the soles of their feet.
The designs of this site tying film fiction back to the real city are somewhat strange. Like science fiction gone archaeological.
Exiled in the middle of the city, surrounded by streets with heavy traffic of petrol driven private cars that are hard to cross, those green islands are dreaming. We love them, hidden in plain site they are, like us.
And behold, the irony – next to all those cars the Viennese like to brag about the number of bikes they also have.
In the back you see the „Verkehrsamt“, one of the more interesting building of its era. It should be painted in two shades of pink, but some Restaurant owner with connections to politics wants it off white.
Lame.
Now we face the „Secession“, but pass it on a small path to its left, through a triangular mini park, along air vents resembling some of our best Futuristic friends.
And there we, or our hosts, end up a little haplessly. The green island ends on the middle of somewhere or nowhere, where two streets meet.
There, in its very centre, in the midst of heavy traffic, where passengers take the shortcut as if it where a mule track, the city seems to forget itself to dream of the country.
That’s where we make our passing homes.
