Sometimes a building disappears from the cityscape – and yet continues to have an impact for a long time. Anyone standing on the Vienna Opera Ring today will see a large, functional reinforced concrete building from the 1950s directly opposite the State Opera, which, with its sober office facade, hardly fits in with the historicism of the Ringstrasse. It is no longer possible to recognize that the “most beautiful apartment building in Vienna” once stood at this location. However, the monumental Heinrichshof, built in 1863 and demolished in 1954, was much more than an unprecedented architectural solitaire: it was a place to live and work, a social microcosm and the scene of central breaks in Vienna’s history.
