St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna

Run the subtractive test on the body and it holds. A hall whose three aisles stand nearly level cannot be covered by three roofs; the one steep roof over all of them is what the section compels, its pitch required against snow and for the long fall of water. The piers carry vault and roof directly, and their saints stand where the hall gives no wall to hold an image. The side towers are compelled by the campaign: the Romanesque front was kept, so height had to rise elsewhere. What yields is the rest. The south tower’s height is a sign, not a use; the north tower stops where money and will stopped; many of the aisle altars could go without loss of purpose.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Two truths are built, not glossed. The first is a dynasty making a parish church the rival of a cathedral. Rudolf IV, son-in-law of the emperor Charles IV, began the nave and the towers as St Vitus rose in Prague, founded a chapter and a university, and put himself and his duchess on the portals: the Habsburgs would make Vienna a capital before the Church gave it a bishop, and the city became what the church claimed. The second is the hall: city and court in one dark room, no clerestory dividing the clergy’s light from the people’s shade. A third, lesser, is the rebuilding after 1945, shared among the provinces. Held below the gate: these are disclosures of power and of a city’s identity more than of a human condition, and the hall’s is its type’s.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation comes often and in two registers. Outside, the south tower is the city’s sublime: a single stone spire, its gables and pinnacles drawn up into the shaft so that it seems to grow rather than stack, seen down the streets that radiate from the square and from the hills. The roof, glazed and patterned, turns in sun and rain like a hide. Inside the register reverses: a dark, tall forest of piers, saints on every one, light only from the aisle windows, and the high altar a lit stage at the end of a long dusk. The pulpit, near at hand, is a small sublime of its own. What holds it below the top: the interior is crowded and dim with accretion, and its height is felt as gloom as often as ascent.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth is built, in parts. The tower is the axis of the city, the centre every street points toward, and it is built as one. The Giant’s Door builds the threshold: a deep, splayed Romanesque portal, its figures and beasts guarding the passage from the market into the sacred, with Christ above. The hall builds the heavenly city as a gathered people, the saints on the piers as the pillars of the Church and the congregation among them. The catacombs below carry the church as the city’s body, its dead laid under it. Much else is evoked rather than built: the name of the Heathens’ Towers, the legends of the builders. Held below the gate because these archetypes are the Gothic church’s, inherited and made particular, not newly constructed.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The lowest of the twelve, and what holds it is that the turns were the region’s. The inheritance: the hall choir of the Austrian Cistercians, Heiligenkreuz the near model; the French cathedral a bishop’s church was expected to be; the great single tower of the German towns, Freiburg’s. The departures are real and credited: a hall nave made the main vessel of a would-be cathedral in place of a basilica; the towers set at the flanks with the old front kept; one colossal tiled roof making the building a single mass; a tower that dissolves its stages into one upward drawing. The stake was the dynasty’s, a parish church built against Prague over a century and more. But each departure was in the air, the hall above all: the building ripened a manner more than it broke from one.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Substitute a basilica and the purpose is lived otherwise. In the hall the people stand among the piers, not below a lit vessel of the clergy; the space is broad, dark and continuous, and processions, guild altars and private devotions go on side by side, as in a covered city square. The piers with their saints make devotion a walk among intercessors. The tower beside the church rather than before it makes the building a landmark from every quarter and leaves the west portal low and close, an entry from the market rather than a ceremonial front. The roof makes the cathedral one object to the city. Held below the top because the form inside is the hall type’s, and the junction of nave and choir and the two unequal towers show campaigns joined rather than one form knowing one thing.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Evidence over promise: centuries of study and questions still open. The building history has been revised again and again: the Romanesque phases and the date of the Giant’s Door, each master’s part in the Gothic campaigns, what Puchsbaum designed and what his successors finished, how the south tower’s design passed from one master to the next. The pulpit’s attribution is argued still, between Anton Pilgram and a sculptor of Niclaes Gerhaert’s circle, and Pilgram’s self-portrait at the organ foot, with the figure that looks out of a window under the pulpit stair, has yielded a literature on the late Gothic artist’s self-presentation. The tomb of Frederick III is one of the great programmes of its century. Held from the top: the questions are of attribution and history more than of what the form means.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The field is the Gothic of the Danube lands and central Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The intrinsic force is real but is not a reorganisation of possibility: the cathedral perfected the hall church at metropolitan scale and the single great tower as a drawn, unified spire, and invented neither. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Vienna lodge stood among the leading lodges of the German lands, its masters, vaults and tower designs passing into Austria, Bohemia, Hungary and southern Germany, and the hall church became the ordinary form of the region’s late Gothic town churches. Outside the region the building is the model of nothing in particular; its fame is that of Vienna’s emblem. Force stands below reach, both within a regional field, and the axis stands well below the gate.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The highest of the twelve. Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is legible and whole: plan, section, towers, west front and the roof’s profile and pattern stand as the building’s own, and the governing idea of one hall under one roof beside one spire is unaltered. The use has been continuous for some eight and a half centuries, as parish, chapter and cathedral, broken only by the fire and the rebuilding. The fabric carries the largest charge: the medieval roof frame and roof, the Gothic choir stalls and the old great bell are lost and replaced, parts of the vault rebuilt, the top of the south spire rebuilt in the nineteenth century, and the stone under continual renewal by the lodge. The pulpit, the tomb and the altar survived. The form outlived the duchy, the empire and the fire.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of building, structure first. The south tower is a masterpiece of stone construction: its stages concealed by gables drawn up the shaft, the octagon and spire carried on a square without a break in the figure, built in some seven decades and standing since 1433. The nave is a hall of great width vaulted in net and star vaults on slender piers under a roof of extreme pitch. The sculpture is of the first rank in its century: the pulpit, the organ foot, the tomb of Frederick III, the pier figures, the ducal portals. The costs: the junction of the Romanesque front and the Gothic body is a fit, not a design; the north tower is a stump; the interior is poorly lit for a hall of its size; and the command is a strong regional lodge’s at its best, not a structure without precedent.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the Giant’s Door, Romanesque, round-arched, deep and squat, with its beasts; and the Baroque high altar, black marble, a painted martyrdom framed in a classical aedicule. They do not obey one law. Between them the Gothic law governs most of the work: the hall section, the vault nets, the gabled bays of the south flank, the tower’s upward drawing, one physics from choir to spire. The roof is the strongest unifier, putting the whole under one mass. But the north tower breaks off into a Renaissance cap, the nave altars are of several centuries and manners, and the west front is a kept older building with a newer one behind it. The range is wide, much of it held by accumulation rather than law: the figure clears the floor with room and stops short of the buildings that are one design.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Many orders are held, and the building places them. The sacred: the liturgy, the relics, the saints on every pier. The state: the Habsburg dukes who founded it, the emperor entombed in its choir, the ducal portals, the eagle on the roof. The city: the parish of the citizens, the guild altars, the tower as watch over the roofs. Death: the catacombs, the tombs, the plague dead. Labour: the lodge that built it and keeps it still, its masters’ faces in the fabric. History and war: the siege of 1683, the fire of 1945, the resistance sign by the door, the rebuilding by the nation. Music, faintly: the choir in which Haydn sang and the church in which Mozart married. City at the door, state in the choir, the dead below, the sign above. What holds it: the family and the single consciousness enter only through devotion.

Score: 8.4 / 10