MAK — Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna

At a glance

The MAK is Vienna’s museum of applied arts, and its building was the first museum ever raised on the Ringstraße. Heinrich von Ferstel built it in brick between 1869 and 1871 for an institution founded eight years earlier on the model of London’s South Kensington Museum: a collection assembled not for connoisseurs but for craftsmen and manufacturers to study and copy. That original purpose still explains the place. The MAK holds the estate of the Wiener Werkstätte, the bentwood of Thonet and Kohn, and Gustav Klimt’s full-size working drawings for the mosaic frieze of the Palais Stoclet in Brussels — objects that were made to be used, kept in a building that was made to teach.

Key facts

Architect: Heinrich von Ferstel | Built: 1869–1871, opened 15 November 1871 | Extension: Ludwig Baumann, designed 1906, completed 1908 (Weiskirchnerstraße 3) | Address: Stubenring 5, 1010 Vienna, Austria | GPS: 48.20742, 16.38151 | Style: Neo-Renaissance, brick | Founded: 7 March 1863, as the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry | Current use: museum of applied arts and contemporary art

History

On 7 March 1863 Emperor Franz Joseph I founded the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry. The model was explicit: London’s South Kensington Museum, opened in 1852 and now the Victoria and Albert, which had been created to raise the standard of British manufacture by putting good objects in front of the people who made things. Vienna wanted the same for Austrian industry. Rudolf von Eitelberger, the first professor of art history at the University of Vienna, was appointed director.

The museum needed a building, and it got the first one on the new Ringstraße — before the Kunsthistorisches Museum, before the Naturhistorisches, before the university. Heinrich von Ferstel designed it in the Neo-Renaissance manner but left the brick exposed rather than rendering it in stone, a choice that reads as a statement about honest materials in a boulevard of palaces. It opened to the public on 15 November 1871. Between 1875 and 1877 Ferstel added the Kunstgewerbeschule next door — the school of applied arts, today the University of Applied Arts — so that the collection and the teaching stood side by side, as the South Kensington model prescribed.

Ludwig Baumann designed a further extension on Weiskirchnerstraße in 1906; it was finished in 1908. In 1989 the museum closed for a general refurbishment that dug new depots beneath it, and reopened in 1993 with something unusual: the permanent collection galleries had been designed by contemporary artists, among them Barbara Bloom, Günther Förg, Jenny Holzer and Donald Judd, each given a room and a period to interpret.

What you see

From the Stubenring the museum shows a long brick front articulated by arcaded windows and pale stone dressings. Ferdinand Laufberger ran a sgraffito frieze across it and painted the staircase frescoes inside; the painted figures on the outer facade were remade around 1893 by students of the school next door, which is a neat proof that the teaching arrangement worked. Inside, the heart of the building is the columned hall, an arcaded court under a glass roof, galleries running round it on two levels — the room that Ferstel’s contemporaries would have called a covered courtyard and that the museum still uses as its main space.

Inside the building

The collections

The MAK’s holdings run from the Middle Ages to the present, but the reason travellers come is the turn of the twentieth century. The museum keeps the archive and a large part of the surviving production of the Wiener Werkstätte, the workshop founded in 1903 by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser; the bentwood chairs of Thonet and of Jacob & Josef Kohn; and Klimt’s cartoons for the Stoclet frieze, drawn for the dining room of the Brussels house that Hoffmann built between 1905 and 1911. Alongside these are Du Paquier and Vienna porcelain, Venetian and Bohemian glass, Chinese porcelain and Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints — the Asian collections having been assembled, like everything else here, as models for makers.

Practical information

The MAK stands at Stubenring 5, on the eastern arc of the Ringstraße. Opening hours and admission are published on the museum’s own site, mak.at, and are worth checking before a visit: the museum has long run an evening opening on one weekday, and parts of the permanent collection close in rotation when the artist-designed galleries are reworked.

Getting there

Stubentor (U3) is on the doorstep, and Landstraße–Wien Mitte (U3, U4, S-Bahn and the airport train) is about five minutes on foot. Trams 2 and the Ring lines stop along the Stubenring itself. From Stephansplatz the walk is about ten minutes east through the Innere Stadt.

Nearby heritage

The University of Applied Arts, Ferstel’s companion building of 1875–1877, adjoins the museum. The Postsparkasse, Otto Wagner’s steel-and-marble bank of 1906, is a two-minute walk north on Georg-Coch-Platz and is the single building that best explains what the Vienna of the Wiener Werkstätte was arguing about. The Secession building, Joseph Maria Olbrich’s 1898 exhibition hall with its gilded dome, lies about 1.5 km to the south-west across the Ring.

Sources

MAK official site: mak.at. Wikipedia: Museum für angewandte Kunst (Wien); Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna. Coordinates from OpenStreetMap Nominatim. Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited in the captions.