Secession Building

A white cube crowned by a dome of gilded wrought-iron laurel leaves, the Secession Building looks less like a gallery than a small temple, and that was the point. Joseph Maria Olbrich designed it in 1897–98 as the home and manifesto of the Vienna Secession, the group of painters, sculptors and architects around Gustav Klimt who had broken away from the city's conservative artists' association. Above the entrance, in gold letters, runs their creed, coined by the critic Ludwig Hevesi: "Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit" – to every age its art, to art its freedom. Viennese wits were less reverent, nicknaming the dome the "cabbage head" and mocking the smooth, windowless walls as an "Assyrian convenience".

The details reward a slow look. Three gorgon heads by Othmar Schimkowitz above the door stand for painting, sculpture and architecture; owls designed by Koloman Moser perch on the side façades; the bronze doors were designed by Klimt's brother Georg. Olbrich himself described wanting walls that were white, gleaming and chaste, inspired by the unfinished Greek temple he had seen at Segesta in Sicily. The building rests on concrete piers eight metres deep, reaching down to the Wien river, which flows underground at this point, and much of its cost was raised by the artists themselves, with major support from the industrialist Karl Wittgenstein, father of the philosopher Ludwig.

Its greatest treasure lies in the basement. Klimt painted the Beethoven Frieze for the Secession's fourteenth exhibition in 1902, intending it as a temporary decoration; a collector bought it the following year to save it from destruction, and it is now back in the building on permanent loan from the Belvedere. More than 34 metres long, it follows Richard Wagner's reading of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: floating figures yearning for happiness, the giant Typhon and his daughters the gorgons as the hostile forces, and a closing choir of angels and an embrace "for all the world". The building was badly damaged by fire at the end of the Second World War and rebuilt by 1964 with interiors by Josef Hoffmann. Today it remains an artist-run exhibition hall for contemporary art, and its silhouette appears on the Austrian 50-cent coin. It stands at the edge of Vienna's Innere Stadt beside Karlsplatz, close to the Academy of Fine Arts and within sight of the baroque dome of the Karlskirche, which the gilded cupola deliberately echoes.

Getting there

The building is in central Vienna, about 1 km from the historic city centre, close to Karlsplatz station on the U1, U2 and U4 underground lines. The nearest airport is Vienna International (VIE), about 18 km to the south-east.