To walk among spheres
Jan. 05, 2026
To walk among spheres
… is to walk “out of this world” (Stoner)
In the halls of the Globe Museum in Vienna, we see the twin spheres built by Jesuit Andreas Spitzer in 1764, seven years after Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) was removed from the pope’s index of forbidden books. We learn that “Armillary spheres are astronomical instruments known since Antiquity. […] From the sixteenth century onwards, [they were made] with either geocentric or heliocentric models.” Whether earth or sun, we look at prisoners in an emptiness measuring 30 cm in diameter. The boundaries of these emptinesses are like measuring tape arching the orbits of planets and other celestial objects around the sun, around the earth. We are witnesses to a perpetual swirl of concentric circles containing the illusion of space and that of nothingness. Spitzer’s spheres shine.
In the halls of the Globe Museum in Palais Mollard on Herrengasse,
we discover Latin etymologies:
“armilla” are rings,
“tellurium” is earth,
“lunarium” is the moon
– all caught up in ores of golden leaves and precious woods.
In these halls, on the floor, patterns of interlocked circles roll out dignified loops and their junctures. We entangle our feet in these circles. Perplexing wooden sets support spheres and globes, maps too. The museum is a marvel – here, a foldable globe; there a stretchable one that looks like an umbrella (“umbra,” shadow from the sun) when it is not open. A globe to hide the sun, folding the earth around its south and north.
Rotation is time and we go back to 1515 – to Albrecht Dürer’s Maps of the Northern and Southern Sky, a colored woodcut from which stars are absent. Instead, revolving inside an impeccable circle, orchestrated millimeter by millimeter, surrounded by annotations and heraldic arms, are fabulous animals – one with a large belly, another sinuous, a dog, a monster, a horse – cruising around one or two humans – who knows –, the king’s jesters and their boat pushed by furious winds and their waves.
Globes are pleasing forms.
To find them, one only needs to walk.
At the top of the PdBA are two shiny globes, each supported by three women. They are not armillary spheres, but the void inside them makes me think of them. They are prodigies. Between their heavy continents – in lieu of oceanic depths – we glimpse at the vivacity of the sky. Airborne mainlands pressing on the shoulders of statues to find a stable place in the firmament. Yet, there is an aeriality about them, an endearing lightness – two see-through bulbs, their fusion with the azure as if they rotated along stars.
We have to think of the six women when it is cold and drab, when we think of planes flying away from the city and from the miasmas of its winters, when the fog transports us in its deliriums. The globes burdening their shoulders hang in the sky, continue to shine. Six women bearing the steadfast halos of twin planets: they do what statues do – exhibit themselves, petrify statements, mimic power.
We imagine them flying in the nineteen twenties, statues of latitudes.
Inside the building hums the lightness of a leisurely world and lifestyle magazines. In 1918, women can vote. One travels; one is mobile. The capitalists’ wives. A world about to disappear in a roar. In and around Vienna, the women of Klimt stand upright, overpowering, sometimes in a garden; they will be famous for this. Here on Löwengasse, we have aerial women.
They stand without a smile and are strong although the shining globes obliterate them – these gray creatures and their paleness.
There are two see-through earths up in the air at the PdBA.
Weighing on the building and its grounds, two world-maps whose transparency walks us through the sky scatter an ode to women carrying the world, sowing to the four winds, “semer aux quatre vents.”
To the PdBA, I think we shall return, as in a refrain, to a feminist panorama – the six statues in their erotic poses – stern, grimacing women carrying the continents above their heads, in the lucid sky under which they lose their luster.
For now, let’s go through the city, looking up, noticing more spheres, more globes – globe-like forms, convoluted circles. We feel the slow delights of wandering under an ethereal city, from roof to roof, observed by carousels of statues over us and by these round shapes occupying the sky like summer suns, each like a ball shot above high walls, like time and place safely surrounding us. Abounding spheres and abounding globes.
Over Vienna hang spheres and globes.
Here, a wish to list them all and maintain an archive specifying the characteristics of each. We wonder why we like bulbs and circles above us – maybe they bring songs of balance to the trepidation of the streets and make us forget that masses move and throb loudly; or, maybe, they tell us that there exists a space where things are round and nice, where gods are delectably dead and humans far away.
I think we are condemned to like rondures and spheres.
Let’s go down Löwengasse.
A man, his arms crossed, stands under the green Radetzkyplatz sign for bikes at the zebra crossing facing the Urania, whose name is spelled out twice on its curved façade. Cars waiting – one is red – for pedestrians and cyclists to finish crossing the asphalt. Perched on the Urania, a perfect orb contemplates us. We know that Radetzkyplatz is one kilometer away.
The dotted lines on the façade of the Postsparkasse, its candid lawn, its anonymous normality. Its everyday youth. We see the sun walk its course from window to window and from one radiant reflection to another. On the roof, Othmar Schimkowitz’ elongated angels spread out their wings as if to engulf us. They hold four silvery rings, one in each hand. How placative these circles are, how singular on a building so angular that not even the Ö in “Österreich” is round.
On Schwarzenbergplatz, convulsed twin statues and their posing companions stand on the Haus der Kaufmannschaft. They too carry armillary-like spheres goldening the sky above their alabaster white. Metonymic spheres at best, empty cages missing content, mere reminders of astronomies.
Now to Paulanerstrasse in Wieden. Here, where Favoritenstrasse begins, the Palais Erzherzog Carl-Ludwig. On this side of the palais, it is a post-WWII construction neighboring the Institute of Sensor and Actuator Systems. On Favoritenstrasse 7, at the duke’s, a solid, sober yellow sphere cancels history. Behind the palais, there is a park.
Close by, half-hidden on the roof of Jean Sibelius’ home on Waaggasse 1, another such solid-yellow ball, however smaller and diffident. One must stretch one’s neck to see it, suspended high above a few trees in front of the house.
Our last station is Naschmarkt 38, one of the Otto-Wagner houses, like the PdBA “aryanized” during the dictatorship less than a century ago. Here, no spheres on the roof, no half-naked bodies, no shiny golden leaves under the sun. Yet, let’s meet again Othmar Schimkowitz, father of the two angels on the roof of the Postsparkasse where we stopped on our way. On Naschmarkt, there are no angels. Here are the busts of two callers, two women shouting out, their mouths wide open, their faces dark and determined, their hands raised up to amplify the scream chasing the flâneurs and flâneuses of the world.