In this critical biography coedited with Wolfgang Herzner, the architectural historians Ursula Prokop and Inge Scheidl combine their knowledge of Viennese architectural and urban history to present the life and work of one of the first Jewish architects of post-Ausgleich Vienna, Wilhelm Stiassny. This oft-forgotten architect left behind mixed residential and commercial structures, public buildings, synagogues, and sepulchers. His international network of sponsors and collaborators led to such accomplishments as designs for a Palestinian garden city and construction beyond his Viennese home, likely as far as Turkey.
Born in 1842 in Preßburg/Pozsony, Stiassny moved to Vienna in 1846, where he grew up. After attending Realschule, Stiassny studied architecture at the Imperial-Royal Polytechnic Institute Vienna and the Imperial and Royal Unified Academy of Fine Arts before establishing his architectural firm in 1868. Stiassny quickly became a recognized member of the architectural community as delegate of the Austrian Commission for the World Exposition in Paris in 1867. The timing of his professional start is, however, also significant. The Ausgleich of 1867 gave Jews equal civil, political, and religious rights and resulted in both an increase in Jewish residents in Vienna and in Jewish owned land in the city that required development. Stiassny constructed numerous mixed commercial and residential buildings for successful Viennese families, many Jewish, in central locations such as the textile quarter and the area surrounding the town hall and, as a consultant and elected official, he was involved in Viennese urban planning. These established his professional reputation and left an architectural imprint upon the Viennese landscape.
Stiassny is included in most general reference works on Viennese architectural history. He appears in the online Architektenlexikon (2003–13), a project headed by Scheidl, and is given some attention in Prokop's Zum jüdischen Erbe in der Wiener Architektur (Vienna, 2016). However, it is Satako Tanaka's dissertation, Wilhelm Stiassny (1842–1910). Synagogen, Orientalismus und jüdische Identität (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 2009), that constitutes the first significant study of Stiassny. Tanaka focuses on synagogues, but she also presents a trailblazing and engaging analysis of Stiassny's political engagement and his position within Jewish culture in Vienna, making it required complementary reading to this text. Like Tanaka, Prokop and Scheidl frame their architectural study with Stiassny's early work as a municipal council member and end with his commitment to Jewish culture as a founder of the Jewish Museum in Vienna as well as a discussion of his propitiatory role in the increasingly hostile antisemitic political landscape.
The contemporary pedestrian in Vienna will not note Stiassny's buildings. Even those that were destroyed by or during Nazi rule were rather unassuming. As Prokop notes, Stiassny moved toward a modernist vocabulary only tentatively in the last decade of his career. Instead, his work is situated in the established historicism of the time. Informed by comparisons to better-known buildings, Scheidl's analysis attends to the small variations on mixed commercial and residential buildings. These range from unique facade ornamentation to shifts in spatial organization. Scheidl also notes, when possible, how patrons influenced building projects, an issue to which Prokop devotes attention in her following section on Stiassny's building projects for social and cultural institutions and funded by wealthy Jewish families. The architectural study of Stiassny's work concludes with a section on his monuments for cemeteries and religious buildings, which again were often for wealthy Jewish families and communities like Baden bei Wien. Prokop situates Tanaka's analysis in a wider context of Stiassny's sepulcher and buildings devoted to Jewish ritual and yet allows for attention to Stiassny's famous synagogue work, including his famous 1903 Jubilee Synagogue (now known as the Jerusalem Synagogue) in Prague. A discussion of Moorish references in his historicism for synagogues transitions into an overview of Stiassny's participation in public Jewishness.
A substantial appendix is compiled by the third editor of the monograph, Herzner, and showcases the archival work of Dagmar Herzner-Kaiser. On its own, the appendix constitutes a significant resource for future scholarship and includes a comprehensive list of Stiassny's built and unbuilt oeuvre, with details such as the building type, owner, master builder, construction period, and sources. A map of Vienna in 1900 visualizes Stiassny's work in Vienna, but its tiny scale makes it rather difficult to decipher, particularly for anyone less than familiar with Vienna. For those interested in Stiassny's political and social history, his membership in clubs, councils and other institutions, city commissions and committees, and a list of clients and donors rounds off the appendix. A bibliography of primary and secondary sources closes out the volume.
Scholars in architectural history, Austrian and Viennese studies, and Jewish studies will find the volume of interest due to Stiassny's architectural oeuvre and his public Jewishness in Vienna. Each section summarizes pertinent information from others and allows for excerpts to be used in teaching as well. That said, the book does not provide thorough cultural analysis on such important elements as Stiassny's Jewishness and the relationship between cultural memorialization and rising fascism. Also, while the book pursues the question of Jewish patronage, it falls short of a broad historical discussion of the issue. These are, however, not fair criticisms of a book of architectural history; instead, they are suggestions as to where scholarship might continue to learn more about the culture of Vienna from Stiassny's life and work.
Stiassny's significance is in his reliable completion of a wide range of architectural projects, his conciliatory and bipartisan role in Viennese politics, and his position within a network of Jewish individuals and institutions creating urban and cultural change in Vienna after the Ausgleich. The authors' equivocal use of language to refer to persecution and violence against Jews and Jewish culture and intermittent reference to Jewish history, occasionally in footnotes, emphasize the need for further study. Nevertheless, the work makes Stiassny and his noteworthy architectural contribution visible, even though so much of his career has been neglected, made invisible, or systematically destroyed.
