News, The Spaces of Vienna

Memory as museum 

by Madison Eiberger

A piece in one of the more modern hand crafted dinning sets for sale at the porcelain museum. 

VIENNA, Austria – Tucked away on a small side street in Vienna’s Second District is a museum few guidebooks mention: the Augarten Porzellanmuseum (Augarten Porcelain Museum).  

Occupying the right side of a faded yellow building adjacent to a café/sports bar, the smallish museum displays over 150 different handmade porcelain objects from dining sets to busts of former Austrian leaders.   

Christoph Simon, Augarten store/museum manager and event coordinator 

Visitors can view the history of Viennese porcelain from its inception to today.    

Although the museum itself is fairly new, the Augarten Manufactory has been making porcelain pieces for centuries.  

“Our museum opened about ten years ago, but our manufactory is the second largest in Europe, founded in 1718,” said Christoph Simon, the museum’s manager. 

The manufactory offers weekday tours that walk guests through the process of making intricate porcelain pieces. And visitors can take a piece of history home. In addition to the porcelain displayed in the museum, Augarten’s line of porcelains is sold in stores throughout Austria and Europe.   

One of the biggest pieces of the Augarten museum, “Wild and Free,” has white porcelain horses running in a meadow. 

“The museum has a long, long history, and maybe that’s why it’s so interesting,” said Suzanne Wolve an employee at the museum. “Because of World War I and World War II, there is not so much left, and that’s why the things in this museum are very special.”  

At Augarten Porzellanmuseum visitors can see one of the original kilns from 1923 that stands at two stories high.  

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