Brutalism in Vienna

Vienna came late to brutalism, and its best examples are sacred rather than civic. The Wotrubakirche, completed in 1976 on a hill at the city's southwestern edge, was conceived by the sculptor Fritz Wotruba and realized with Fritz Gerhard Mayr as a pile of 152 raw concrete blocks, less a building than an inhabitable sculpture. Johann Georg Gsteu contributed rigorously geometric church architecture in the same decades, and Roland Rainer, the city's chief planner and architect of the Stadthalle, shaped Viennese modernism more broadly. Alongside schools and embassy buildings such as Rolf Gutbrod's German Embassy Vienna, these works show a city testing concrete expression against one of Europe's most historic urban fabrics.