andaz vienna.
Vienna stands for music, architecture, theater, opera, circus, empire, baroque, biedermeier, “Ringstraße”, to name just a few. There is a topos appearing again and again. Dreams and dream worlds forming a parenthesis which connects eras and becomes an exciting topic for this project. Talking about dreams one cannot avoid professor Freud. He has revolutionized the idea of man from of himself with the discovery of the unconscious. He has defended the thesis that culture is constructed by sublimation, made the dream interpretation acceptable and used free association. Speaking of which, what does a rhino do in the entrance of a Viennese hotel?
It tells of the woodcut of a rhinoceros by Albrecht Dürer in Vienna’s Albertina and of the enthusiasm of the imperial couple Franz Stephan and Maria Theresa when the first living rhinoceros came to Vienna in 1745. But above all, it surprises the guests and takes them on a journey to a different world. A world of theater, big stage, small stories, the hotel as a poetic varieté. The central lift block becomes a projection screen for spacial illusions, transcending its materiality. Fragmented chandeliers refer to the imperial past in the lobby.
The red curtain transforms the waiting zone in front of the elevators into a theater foyer with the phantastic baroque character heads of Franz Xaver Messerschidt appearing on stage. The public areas are inspired by the athmosphere of Alma Mahler's Viennese salon. A place to meet, to be inspired, to enjoy viennese hospitality. The hotel room is open and generous hinting at the dream world with its theater loge entrance, Freuds couch, out of focus paintings of contemporary austrian artists and the iluminated danseuse lamp. And this is just the beginning of the story. There is so much more to tell. About the “Dream Story” by Artur Schnitzlers, the poems of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “The Dream, a Life” by Franz Grillparzer, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Adolf Loos …
Some might see a rhinoceros in the lobby, others see
the story behind.
„This print of a rhinoceros was created by Albrecht Dürer, the most famous artist of his day in 1515. Dürer never actually saw a live rhino. His woodcut was a reconstruction based on various pictorial and verbal morsels, and from the very beginning it lived a life independent of its model. The picture gave life to other pictures, these mated with other images, and established their own separate little pasture within the repertory of Renaissance images and other symbols. A rhinoceros had in fact not been seen alive in Europe for over 1,000 years and must have seemed almost mythical to contemporaries. The captivating effect this belligerent creature has had on admirers lasted well into the nineteenth century, mainly because so many thousands of impressions of the woodcut and copies of it were circulated across Europe. Dürer's celebrity was in part due to his ability to make his work both available and affordable to a mass audience. His skills even attracted the attention of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, who commissioned Dürer to produce one of the largest prints in existence, the Triumphal Arch which was also produced in 1515. When the first living rhinoceros came to Vienna in 1745 even the imperial couple Franz Stephan and Maria Theresa went to see it..“
