This Man Shows You The Ugly Side Of Vienna And It Is More Beautiful Than You Can Imagine

Vienna is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. But, if you are interested in taking a walk on the “dark side”, and look into some very ugly architectural blunders, you should take the Vienna Ugly tour with the amazing Eugene Quinn.

Eugene is a London-born, Vienna-based urbanist and a rising cultural figure. His projects include #HowtobeAustrian for Oe1, Social Dinners (where refugees dine with locals), Vienna Coffeehouse Conversations and the Vienna Ugly tour.

The Vienna Ugly tour is attended both by tourists and locals. Locals get to explore their own city from an innovative perspective. A walk of beautiful palaces would not interest many of them, but this will. There is a fascination with death, failure and melancholy in Vienna. And the tourists want to see a bit of a perspective different from that shown on postcards and commercials.

Through humor, Eugene makes some serious points about the role of the media, city-planners, fashion, gentrification, postmodernism, UNESCO and greedy developers.

Attendants are asked to vote on the attractiveness of each building: they need to come on a walk to discover which old or new architecture can be considered ugly and why. Some buildings can be both!

“Current tours of Vienna focus on the old city. We need new stories to tell. Beauty can be boring – but ugly never is. Only through ugliness can we discover true beauty, and the two have an interesting relationship in Vienna,” says Eugene Quinn.