Page - 138 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

138 siting futurity ing […] which he proposed to transform into a hotel to fulfil the growing fashion and demand for well-appointed accommoda- tion” (Denby 1998, 102), were all located on or near the Ring- strasse. And as global tourism continues to grow, palace after palace both along and inside the Ring is converted into a hotel or serviced apartment.7 Unlike Vienna’s grand hotels, those that developed in its hinterland did so according to the usual pattern of mountain railroad development, something the Habsburg Empire led in. Recognized by UNESCO as a world heritage site in 1998, the Sem- mering Line was built to connect Vienna with Trieste, the Em- pire’s main port on the Adriatic. Upon its completion in 1854, it became the first railway to successful solve the considerable challenge of spanning a major mountain chain: “one of the greatest feats of civil engineering from this pioneering phase of railway building,” it represented, according to UNESCO, an “‘out- standing technological solution to a major physical problem,’ whose construction made ‘areas of great natural beauty […] more easily accessible’” (cited in Frank 2012, 193 n24).8 As Ali- son F. Frank perceptively notes, driving these developments was a desire to commodify the elements, in the first instance air but also water. As the same time as their 7 A counter-development is that smaller historical hotels in Vienna that are not central are falling into decay, such the Hotel Roter Hahn in the Landstrasser Hauptstrasse in the third district, in which Beethoven and Mozart are said to have stayed and which has been shuttered since 2000; the Hotel Aphrodite at Praterstern 28 in the second district, which was a four-star wellness hotel in the 1970s but closed in 2008; the Gartenhotel Altmannsdorf in Meidling, which used to host the SPÖ “chancellor parties” and closed over a year ago, and the Hotel Thüringer Hof in the eighteenth district, which used to be a Tulip Inn and has been on the market for several years (Zoidl 2019b). 8 Railway enthusiasts like to refer to its impressive statistics: sixteen viaducts, some with several levels, fifteen tunnels, 142 structures above ground, 129 bridges and built in only six years. Its story is told in admiring detail in Mario Schwarz’s preface to Vasko-Juhász (2018).