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A Westminster Cathedral episode
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
Extract
The story of the Ringstrasse in Vienna is familiar. It took the place of the outdated fortifications round the medieval city. The Emperor decided in 1857, a competition was held in 1858, and the plan was approved in 1859. The ring was going to be a wide green belt with large public buildings dotted around: the Parliament Grecian, the Town Hall Gothic, the Opera, the University, the Museum and School for the Decorative Arts, the Exchange and the Burgtheater all in one form or other neo-Renaissance, and so on.
But one major building was already started when the Ringstrasse was laid out. The Votivkirche was vowed after an attempt had been made in 1853 to assassinate the Emperor. A competition was held and won by Heinrich Ferstel, and the foundation stone was laid in 1856. In the designs, and later in the execution, the church looked like a High Gothic French cathedral [Pl. 36). It is about 90m long and has a facade with two towers crowned by spires and a choir end with an ambulatory and radiating chapels – seven of them as at Beauvais and Cologne. The church was consecrated in 1879.
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- Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1977
References
Notes
1 See Now, Die Wiener Ringstrasse, i, Das Kunstwerk im Bild (Graz 1969).Google Scholar
2 Wibiral, N. & Mikula, R., Heinrich von Ferstel (Wiesbaden 1974), pp.3Google Scholar et seq.
3 The following extracts are taken from N. Wibiral, Heinrich von Ferstel, und der Historismus in der Baukunst des 19. fahrhunderts, PhD dissertation (Vienna 1952), pp. 381-384.
4 See e.g. Pevsner, N., The Buildings of England: York and the East Riding (Harmondsworth 1972), p. 93Google Scholar & passim.
5 See Clarke, B. F. L. & Piper, J., ‘Street’s Yorkshire Churches’ in Concerning Architecture (ed. Summerson, J., London 1968), pp. 209–225.Google Scholar On Sykes see J. Fair- fax-Blakeborough, Sykes of Sledmere (London 1929). The book contains little on the architectural aspects of Sykes, though it tells of his extensive travels in pursuit of buildings and in more detail of his autocratic and prickly character. Temple Moore for example found him ‘difficult to deal with’ (p. 154).
6 M. von Kolisko, ‘Heinrich von Ferstel in England’, Reichspost, No. 118 (24 April 1929). Also Wibiral, & Mikula, , op. cit., p. 38Google Scholar & n. 139. Wibiral (1952), op. cit., p. 383, has a description of the design for London and lists elements which differ from the Votivkirche. The principal alterations are that the nave for London is one bay longer, there is a triforium and the aisles of the transepts do not end in polygonal apses.