Architecture of Europe 1

Vienna: A Classic Mix

From the stately Burgtheater to the outrageously flamboyant modernist Kunsthaus Wien, Austria's capital boasts the world's largest collection of historic architecture.
For the attentive explorer, Vienna's history is written in its buildings. The architecture of Austria's capital can serve as a history book, if one knows how to read it. Old churches, palaces, and mansions as well as new apartment and office buildings convey a great deal about the eras in which they were built. Even the absence of a particular architectural school reveals something about the city's past.

Revolutionary Railways

The Dutch, Swiss, and British are creating jazzy new railway stations in Europe.
If you want to see two of Europe's brightest and most colorful new buildings, simply fly to Holland's Schipol Airport and take a train. Two stops along you will arrive at Amsterdam Slotterdijik - a station that opens a new age in railway architecture as exciting as the advent of the iron and glass roofs of the great nineteenth-century termini.
Holland's revolutionary new stations are based on the simple recognition that there is no more dazzling color in architecture than the blue of the sky. Allow the sunlight to flood in the length and breadth of the building, and every surface will sparkle. And the passengers will be filled with a new a joie de vivre.

Gae Aulenti: Italy's Most Talked-About Architect

"I like trying to do the impossible," Gae Aulenti said in a recent interview. "Challenges stimulate me." Perhaps this explains why the sixty-year-old Milanese grandmother has taken on a series of increasingly complex projects and, in the process, built a reputation as Europe's most controversial architect.
People began talking about Aulenti in a big way in 1964, when she created an eccentric, highly surreal installation for Milan's Thirteenth Triennale of Architecture and Design: a staircase filled with life-size cutouts based on Picasso's 1922 painting Women Running on Beach. The divided opinions on her work reached their high point two years ago, with the opening of Paris' Musee d'Orsay, a turn-of-the-century train station redesigned to display nineteenth-century art. Many observers have called the museum a masterpiece, but just as many dismiss it as a disaster. Joseph Acebillo, the director of planning for the city of Barcelona, where Aulenti is currently reworking the neoclassical Palacio Nacional de Monjuich, calls her "by far the most important architect working in Europe today." But some critics question whether Aulenti can properly be labeled an architect at all, since she has never designed a new building -except for private residents--and is thus perhaps more an interior renovator/designer.