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The Directory › Europe › Austria › Vienna
Plate II · viii · a · The City

Vienna

A city built at the scale of an empire and now used, very calmly, as a place to look at drawings the size of a hand.

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A wide Viennese boulevard in January, wet stone, bare trees and monumental grey facades in low winter light
Plate II · viii · a · The Ring, in January

Everything here is built two sizes too large, and then the thing worth queueing for turns out to be nine inches across.

A day, properly arranged
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One entry, one queue, and a long warm sit afterwards. That is the whole shape of the day.

The entries

One entry, visited, and kept for what is in the drawers rather than on the walls.
An empty print room: long study tables, unlit brass lamps, solander boxes and an open portfolio in grey winter daylight
Interior · The study tables

A collection kept in the dark and shown by rotation asks something of you that a hung wall never does: turn up on the right week, or don't complain.

JANUARY, EARLY
Notes for Vienna

Check what is actually out before you book anything. Works on paper are shown in rotation and rested in between, and the drawings people cross a continent for are frequently in a drawer. I have had both kinds of morning here.

Go at opening and go on a weekday. It will still be busy — it is always busy — but the first hour is the only hour in which you can stand in front of a small sheet for as long as it deserves without apologising to the person behind you.

The city is walkable at the centre and the trams are pleasant rather than necessary. Budget an afternoon of doing nothing afterwards; looking hard at drawings is more tiring than walking a house, and Vienna has never been short of somewhere warm to sit.

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