Sunday, August 03, 2008

Photos I took in Vienna

Sorry for the long hiatus on my part folks. I've been quite swamped with commission stuff, but I'll post some new art shortly.
In the mean time here are some impressions from my recent short trip to Vienna. I'm not sure how much I should post to keep it blog-related and not too boring, but I thought some of these pictures might be of interest to the EBD crowd...

Some architecture:










This final one is a Flak (anti-aircraft cannon) tower from WW2. Apparently they are so sturdy that it is impossible to blow them up whithout destroying the neighboring buildings, so seven of these monsters are still scattered around the city. This one is used as an aquarium I think.

Calling Vienna morbid is an old cliché, yet walking through its streets one does get the feeling that underneath the architectural splendour there's an age old miasma of decay. It's definitely something that is also celebrated in viennese culture. Here's a mural by Blanquet which kind of illustrates this. It's almost as if the alleyway is the parasite-infested underbelly of that classicist building.









Awesome fountain:







A piece of street art I liked:



Horses & helmets:



Creepy statues:



A weird frog in the natural history museum:




Meanwhile, in the Emperor's "private library"...



Vienna's central cemetery is the largest in all of Europe (in terms of dead people buried there). The jewish section is crumbling and overgrown.







And last but not least, some pictures from that anatomical cabinet I mentioned earlier:







3 comments:

Aeron said...

Amazing pictures, Fufu. That mural by Blanquet is insane, his work never ceases to impress. Your choice of imagery taken is very nice.

I hope to be able to visit Europe someday and visit the weirder sites.

Paleo said...

that's a fascinant mini-tour Fufu, great eye! and yeah, seeing Blanquet in mural scale is amazing, but my favourite its the horses & helmets, anyone know if there's a story behind that?

Jerom said...

Great pictures.
You can find views of the anatomical cabinet you saw, in a Taschen book:
http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/classics/all/01868/facts.encyclopaedia_anatomica.htm