BV · Building Vienna
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-10-01 → 2023-01-30
- EU contribution
- €174,167
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Building Vienna
In towns across Europe, the late Middle Ages were characterised not only by economic, social and political instability often to the point of violence and civil war but also by architectural creations of a magnificent scale and quantity. This remarkable paradox is only rarely noted by scholars and typically discussed within the borders of modern nation states and without reference either to the continental context or to social or political theory. This project takes an exceptionally useful case study, Vienna, and does so from a deliberately comparative and theoretical perspective. During the later Middle Ages nearly every church in Vienna was extended, embellished or rebuilt, including the vast Stephansdom, despite – or perhaps because of – the city’s intense civic and political instability. This project aims to provide an explanation for this paradoxical situation, or more specifically, for the specific economic and political conditions that determined its manifestation in Vienna by contrasting them to those that enabled a similar building boom in another European capital, London. By reflecting on the particularities of Viennese socioeconomic and architectural history in the long fifteen century, it aims to model the relationship between changes in civic politics and architectural production that can be used for future scholars of urban life across the European Middle Ages. Although its ambitions are to profoundly shaped the field of medieval historical research, it offers a tool and a perspective that can be applied to our own time as we try to understand how urban life is constituted today.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
‘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.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITAT WIEN · WienCoordinatorAustria
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union