Function and Furnishing at the Vienna Hofburg 1705-1835

The present research proposal represents the continuation and conclusion of the work begun with the FWF-Project P 18199-G06, `The Vienna Hofburg 1705-1835. Planning - Buildings - Furnishing - Function - Meaning`, which ends in August 2008. So far, the priority has been classic ground-laying research, which now needs only limited supplementary work (for instance, in those cases where relevant archival material has lately become accessible or where the importance of the material could only be recognised in the course of recent research). The project proposed here will be devoted largely to problem-orientated questions concerning the principles of the residence`s building politics, its functions and its urbanistic integration, as well as dealing with internal furnishing and the comparativist analysis of the Hofburg in the trans-regional context of `residence culture` in the period concerned. In doing so, contact with related research initiatives within Austria and particularly abroad must also be strengthened. The questions most fundamental to the proposed project concern five main areas: The Politics and Financing of Building Work, whereby particularly the function of the Court Buildings Office (Hofbauamt) and its interaction with the uppermost patron will be important, as will questions of the financing of building projects. Within the framework of Functional History, alongside the reconstruction of sequences of rooms and their functions, developments in ceremonial and the staging of court events will be addressed; in doing so, the significance of the imperial collections should also be better illuminated. The Urbanistic Context deserves particular attention in the 18th and 19th centuries, since the position of the Hofburg close to the city walls meant that, initially, little room remained for the spatial expansion of the residence. Only with the explosion of the bastions (1809) were new formal, but also functional, possibilities opened up. In the context of these investigations, it will also be appropriate to trace changes in the Interior Furnishing of the imperial apartments on the basis of archaeological finds, visual and written sources, and furnishing preserved in situ, as well as to set Habsburg interiors in a trans-regional context. The Comparativist Standpoint in national and international perspective is becoming of central importance for the Vienna Hofburg in the current process of `residence research`. The trans-regional perspective is, in the course of the intended studies, not only a principal methodological necessity, but also something already recorded in numerous 18th -century documents, where different residences were compared with one another. The research project presented here, which has been developed in close cooperation with the other Hofburg projects of the ÖAW, will make it possible to fill a great number of research gaps and to conclude the already- begun studies on the Vienna Hofburg within an ordered framework.

The aim of our research was to achieve a balanced appreciation of the buildings and interiors of the Vienna Hofburg during the Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassical epochs between 1705 and 1835, as well as to point out their more than regional significance by comparing them with other European residences. In the analysis of the building and its history artistic, functional and ceremonial aspects were to be treated equally. Beginning with classical basic-research, methods drawn from Art History were used and in almost all stages of the work extended into the neighboring disciplines of Cultural Studies. After the completion of the research the text is now in an advanced state and after editing will be published as Volume III of a five-part publication about the Building and Functional History of the Vienna Hofburg (Volume IV ed. by Werner Telesko covering the period 18351918 has already been published). The survey was able to build upon the previous project P 18199-G 06 dedicated to the planning and construction history of the residence. This central area of the topic is now resolved to a large extent. Important new findings arose through cooperation with the Vienna University of Technology (Department of Spatial Planning) in reconstructing historical phases by 3-D visualization techniques. This produced new and historically confirmed insights for all periods, and especially for the years around and after 1800, about which little was previously known. It also included important aspects of urbanism and gardening (see the conference volume co-published by our group on the Wiener Stadt- und Burgbefestigung, special issue of the Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege, 2010). The specific characteristics of the building type city residence were to be kept in view: In particular the coexistence of old and new buildings as a distinctive feature of the Vienna Hofburg, which always remained conscious of its long tradition and of its leading role in competition with other dynasties. The failure of radically modernizing expansion plans of several architects during the late Baroque (Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt, Balthasar Neumann, Jean-Nicolas Jadot, etc.) can be explained by this architectonic cultivation of tradition. Priorities of our work thus lay in the realm of Habsburg building-politics, where the role of the rulers was so heterogeneous, that a continuous development can barely be perceived: Karl VI, Maria Theresa, JosephII and Franz II (I) each had very different priorities concerning the residential area. The sections devoted to the functional history of the Hofburg fully consider the lower areas as well as the courtly apartments. In dealing with the hitherto often neglected interior design and its connections with ceremonial duties the focus lay in the Rococo and Neoclassical epochs. As a result, the diverse and extensive oeuvre of the court architect Nikolaus Pacassi (17161790) was defined more precisely (see the workshop about Pacassi at Schönbrunn, January 2012).In most of the thematic foci mentioned it proved to be necessary to take a broad view beyond regional comparisons. Through contacts with thematically related research initiatives nationally (Salzburg) and abroad (Berlin, Bonn, Bratislava, Budapest, Dresden, Kiel, Munich, Prague etc.) the particularity of the Vienna Hofburg could now be more clearly profiled than ever before.