Café Museum is a traditional

Viennese café The Viennese coffee house (, ) is a typical institution of Vienna that played an important part in shaping Viennese culture. Since October 2011 the "Viennese Coffee House Culture" is listed as an "Intangible Cultural Heritage" in the Austrian ...

located in the

Innere Stadt The Innere Stadt (; ; "Inner City") is the 1st municipal Districts of Vienna, district of Vienna () located in the center of the Austrian capital. The Innere Stadt is the old town of Vienna. Until the city boundaries were expanded in 1850, the I ...

first district in Vienna. The café opened in 1899. The original interior was designed by renowned architect

Adolf Loos Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos (; 10 December 1870 – 23 August 1933) was an Austrian and Czechoslovak architect, influential European theorist, and a polemicist of modern architecture. He was inspired by modernism and a widely-known c ...

. The café became a meeting place for Viennese artists.

Location

The café is situated on the ground floor of the corner Friedrichstraße 6 / Operngasse 7 in the first district in Vienna, Austria. The following places are close by:

Naschmarkt The Naschmarkt is a popular fruit and vegetable market in Vienna. Located at the Wienzeile over the Wien River, it is about long. Originally known as Aschenmarkt, it started to be called the Naschmarket around 1820. Nowadays, one can buy fres ...

Karlsplatz is a town square on the border of the first and fourth districts of Vienna, Austria. It is one of the most frequented and best connected transportation hubs in Vienna. The Karlskirche is located here. The first district can be reached either ...

, St. Charles's Church,

Secession Building The Secession Building () is a contemporary art exhibition hall in Vienna, Austria. It was completed in 1898 by Joseph Maria Olbrich as an architectural manifesto for the Vienna Secession, a group of rebel artists that seceded from the long-estab ...

Academy of Fine Arts The following is a list of notable art schools. Accredited non-profit art and design colleges * Adelaide Central School of Art * Alberta College of Art and Design * Art Academy of Cincinnati * Art Center College of Design * The Art Institute ...

History

Café Museum was established in a building designed in 1872 by Otto Thienemann. Ludwig Frisch, who opened the café in 1899, chose the name referring to the ''Café zum Museum'', which is located next to

Kunsthistorisches Museum The Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien ( "Vienna Museum of art history, Art History", often referred to as the "Museum of Fine Arts, Vienna") is an art museum in Vienna, Austria. Housed in its festive palatial building on the Vienna Ring Road, i ...

. The furnishings of the café were influenced by the simple and sober style, which was expressed with bentwood chairs made by the firm

Gebrüder Thonet Gebrüder Thonet or the Thonet Brothers was a European furniture manufacturer. Three firms descended from the original company remain active today, in Germany (Thonet GmbH), Austria (Thonet Vienna) and the Czech Republic (TON). History Gebrüde ...

. In view of this, Ludwig Hevesi created the nickname ''Café Nihilismus'' (café nihilism) for the café. Even the front is held in a very simple style – nowadays you can only see the golden letters “Café Museum” on a white background. At the beginning of the 1930s the architect Josef Zotti, a student of

Josef Hoffmann Josef Hoffmann (15 December 1870 – 7 May 1956) was an Austrians, Austrian-Sudeten Germans, Moravian architect and designer. He was among the founders of Vienna Secession and co-establisher of the Wiener Werkstätte. His most famous architect ...

, redesigned the café. He installed lodges and half-round sofas with red pleather along the walls. Hence he created a living room atmosphere that stood in contrast to the earlier design. After the renovation in 2003, which reconstructed Loos’ original design, some of the original items made by Zotti can be found in the Viennese

Imperial Furniture Collection The Imperial Furniture Collection () in Vienna is a furniture museum that houses one of the most important collections of furniture in the world.

Interior furnishing

Adolf Loos, architect of the café's original furnishings, had the opinion that an architect had to focus on the functional aspects and not on the artistic ones. He concentrated on a very plain design for the Café Museum, which was revolutionary in the time of its opening. When the café was renovated in 2010, the architect Peter Schwarz followed the original design of Josef Zotti. The half-round sofas are not covered with red pleather as in the original Zotti-design but with red velvet. Also the metal lamps made out of

chromium Chromium is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in Group 6 element, group 6. It is a steely-grey, Luster (mineralogy), lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal. Chromium ...

nickel Nickel is a chemical element; it has symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel is a hard and ductile transition metal. Pure nickel is chemically reactive, but large pieces are slo ...

steel, which reflect the interior of the café, were restored. The light source is inside of the globe, which has an aperture at the top. The light is reflected by the smaller half globe that is attached to the ceiling above the lamp. Nowadays the café can seat 207 guests.

Coffee house readings

The Café Museum has offered regular readings since October 2011. The authors, who have held readings, include

Daniel Glattauer Daniel Glattauer (born 19 May 1960) is an Austrian writer and former journalist. He was born in Vienna, where he still lives and works. A former regular columnist for ''Der Standard,'' a national daily newspaper, he is best known for his dialogic ...

Christine Nöstlinger Christine Nöstlinger (13 October 1936 – 28 June 2018) was an Austrian writer best known for children's books. She received one of two inaugural Astrid Lindgren Memorial Awards from the Swedish Arts Council in 2003, the biggest prize in childr ...

Franzobel Franzobel is the pseudonym of the Austrian writer (Franz) Stefan Griebl. He was born on 1 March 1967 in Vöcklabruck, Upper Austria. In 1997, he won the Wolfgang Weyrauch Prize and in 1998, the Kassel Literary Prize, amongst numerous other lit ...

, Lisa Lercher, Armin Thurnher, Susanne Scholl, Gerhard Loibelsberger and Elfriede Hammerl.

Famous guests

Regular guests of the café in the early twentieth century included

Peter Altenberg Peter Altenberg (9 March 1859 – 8 January 1919) was a writer and poet from Vienna, Austria. He played a key role in the genesis of early modernism in the city. Biography He was born Richard Engländer on 9 March 1859 in Vienna into a Jews, J ...

, Joseph Schmidt, Richard Tauber,

Alban Berg Alban Maria Johannes Berg ( ; ; 9 February 1885 – 24 December 1935) was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively sma ...

Hermann Broch Hermann Broch (; 1 November 1886 – 30 May 1951) was an Austrian writer, best known for two major works of modernist fiction: '' The Sleepwalkers'' (''Die Schlafwandler,'' 1930–32) and '' The Death of Virgil'' (''Der Tod des Vergil,'' 1945). ...

Elias Canetti Elias Canetti (; 25 July 1905 – 14 August 1994; ; ) was a German-language writer, known as a Literary modernism, modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and nonfiction writer. Born in Ruse, Bulgaria, to a Sephardi Jews, Sephardic Jewish fam ...

Gustav Klimt Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement. His work helped define the Art Nouveau style in Europe. Klimt is known for his paintings, murals, sket ...

Oskar Kokoschka Oskar Kokoschka (1 March 1886 – 22 February 1980) was an Austrian artist, poet, playwright and teacher, best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes, as well as his theories on vision that influenced the Viennese Expre ...

, Karl Kraus,

Franz Lehár Franz Lehár ( ; ; 30 April 1870 – 24 October 1948) was an Austro-Hungarian composer. He is mainly known for his operettas, of which the most successful and best known is '' The Merry Widow'' (''Die lustige Witwe''). Life and career L ...

Robert Musil Robert Musil (; 6 November 1880 – 15 April 1942) was an Austrian philosophical writer. His unfinished novel, ''The Man Without Qualities'' (), is generally considered to be one of the most important and influential modernist novels. Family M ...

Leo Perutz Leopold Perutz (2 November 1882 – 25 August 1957) was an Austrian novelist and mathematician. Born in Prague, he lived in Vienna until the Nazi ''Anschluss'' in 1938, when he emigrated to Palestine. According to the biographical note on the A ...

Joseph Roth Moses Joseph Roth (2 September 1894 – 27 May 1939) was an Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist, best known for his family saga '' Radetzky March'' (1932), about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his novel of Jewish life ...

, Roda Roda,

Egon Schiele Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele (; 12 June 1890 – 31 October 1918) was an Austrian Expressionist painters, painter. His work is noted for its intensity and its raw sexuality, and for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude sel ...

Georg Trakl Georg Trakl (; 3 February 1887 – 3 November 1914) was an Austrian poet and the brother of the pianist Grete Trakl. He is considered one of the most important Austrian Expressionists. He is perhaps best known for his poem " Grodek", which h ...

Otto Wagner Otto Koloman Wagner (; 13 July 1841 – 11 April 1918) was an Austrian architect, furniture designer and urban planner. He was a leading member of the Vienna Secession movement of architecture, founded in 1897, and the broader Art Nouveau mo ...

Franz Werfel Franz Viktor Werfel (; 10 September 1890 – 26 August 1945) was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet whose career spanned World War I, the Interwar period, and World War II. He is primarily known as the author of '' The Forty ...

and

Ernst Jandl Ernst Jandl (; 1 August 1925 – 9 June 2000) was an Austrian writer, poet, and translator. He became known for his experimental lyric, mainly sound poems (''Sprechgedichte'') in the tradition of concrete and visual poetic forms. Poetry Inf ...

References

;Notes ;Bibliography *

Felix Czeike Felix Czeike (21 August 1926 – 23 April 2006) was an Austrian historian and popular educator. He was an author and partly also editor of numerous publications on the history of Vienna and was the director of the . His main work is the six-volume ...

: ''Historisches Lexikon Wien''. Band 1. Verlag Kremayr & Scheriau, Wien 1992, , S. 539. * Hans Veigl: ''Wiener Kaffeehausführer''. Kremayr und Scheriau, Wien 1994, . * Bartel F. Sinhuber: ''Zu Gast im alten Wien. Erinnerungen an Hotels, Wirtschaften und Kaffeehäuser, an Bierkeller, Weinschenken und Ausflugslokale''. Amalthea, Wien 1997, .

External links

*
Café Museum
at ORF

at Planet Vienna
Café Museum
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cafe Museum Coffeehouses and cafés in Vienna Adolf Loos buildings Commercial buildings completed in 1872 1872 establishments in Austria Establishments in the Empire of Austria (1867–1918) 19th-century architecture in Austria