Palais Albrecht

The Palais Albrecht was a grand four-storey Baroque palace in Vienna’s old town. It stood at a right angle to the surviving building of the Old University, completing the harmonious shape of the square until 1903. The site once held two separate houses, numbers 758 and 759, bought in 1690 and 1692 by imperial councillor Franz Gottlieb von Albrecht and his wife. Little survives about the building’s early years, but records show the Albrechts enlarged the houses into a single palace early in the 18th century. After the widow’s death in 1705 the palace passed to her stepson Conrad Adolf von Albrecht. A contemporary print by Salomon Kleiner suggests the owner himself designed the rich façade. By the late 18th century the building had new owners, then in 1853 it belonged to Karl and Rudolf Auspitz, the latter a well-known industrialist and politician. Visitors today will not find the original palace, for it was demolished in 1903. A six-storey late-Gründerzeit apartment house now occupies the site, its façade decorated in Secessionist style. The palace’s memory lives on only in prints and photographs, yet its former place in the square’s harmony remains part of Vienna’s architectural story.