Laxenburg castles

The Old Palace and the wide hunting ground around it both date from the 13th century, when they belonged to the lords of Lachsenburg. That line died out in the 14th century and the property passed to the Habsburgs, an acquisition dated to 1333, after which Albrecht III rebuilt and enlarged the hunting lodge. A chapel in one of the towers was already mentioned in 1332, and a foundation charter records a new chapel raised in 1389. The building later fell into decay, and was renovated and given its baroque dress under Leopold I by the architect Lodovico Burnacini.

In 1682 the Laxenburg Alliance was concluded in the palace, a defensive league of several imperial powers against the expansionist France of Louis XIV. A year later, during the second Turkish siege, the Old Palace was destroyed again. It was rebuilt by 1693 and raised by a storey, and in the course of the 18th century the original moats were filled in. The church of Laxenburg belongs to the same rebuilding decades: begun by Carlo Antonio Carlone between 1693 and 1703 and continued by Matthias Steinl from 1703 to 1724, it was the first building north of the Alps to carry the swung façade components of the high baroque.

The Blauer Hof, also called the Neues Schloss, first appears in 1544 as a Freihof held by Melchior Arguello; its name came from a later owner, Sebastian von Ploenstein. The imperial vice-chancellor Friedrich Karl von Schönborn had it extended between 1710 and 1720 to designs by Lucas von Hildebrandt, and the counts Metsch and Daun held it after him. It came to Maria Theresa in 1762, and her court architect Nikolaus Pacassi enlarged it generously between 1765 and 1767 — work made necessary not least by the sixteen children of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. Pacassi added the dining-hall wing and the palace theatre; around 1774 a belvedere was set on the east wing, its illusionistic interior paintings by artists who were never documented.

After 1780, under Joseph II, the 280-hectare park was recast as an English landscape garden, unlike Schönbrunn's, which kept its French plan. From the mid-1790s Franz II/I laid out the Rittergau, a quarter of winding paths, ponds and watercourses furnished with buildings in a neo-medieval style. At its centre lies the 25-hectare palace lake, the largest of its kind in Austria, on whose island the Franzensburg was built between 1801 and 1836 and named for the emperor; the Triesting canal, cut in 1801, brought water to the park from Münchendorf. The Haus der Laune, raised around 1798 by Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg, was badly damaged in the fighting of 1809 and lost its character in the plain refacing of 1814.

Franz Joseph I and Elisabeth spent their honeymoon at Laxenburg in 1854, and two of their four children were born there: Gisela in 1856 and Crown Prince Rudolf, born in the Blauer Hof in 1858. Rudolf's own daughter, Archduchess Elisabeth Marie, was born at Laxenburg on 2 September 1883. At the outbreak of the First World War Franz Joseph ordered the Blauer Hof given over as a military hospital, and on 15 March 1917 Karl I moved the imperial court there from Schönbrunn, staying until 6 February 1918 — Baden, where he personally led the Army High Command, lay close by, and at Laxenburg he could keep up political contacts without being constantly watched by the Viennese.

With the monarchy gone, the estate passed from the Habsburg-Lorraine family fund to the war-damaged fund, and Vienna took over the war-damaged palace and park in 1919; a Société Anonyme Chateau Laxenbourg tried from 1922 to market the grounds at a profit and failed in 1924. In 1938 Laxenburg was absorbed into Greater Vienna as part of the 24th district, the Blauer Hof and its outbuildings became a Wehrmacht military store, and most of the furniture and works of art went to museums in Vienna. In 1945 the palace and much of the park were occupied by the Soviet army, with a Red Army command post in the Blauer Hof; Lower Austria stayed in the Soviet zone until 1955, by which year the palace was in very poor condition. The municipality returned to Lower Austria in 1954, a joint operating company of Lower Austria and Vienna took over palace and park in 1962, the Old Palace has held part of the Austrian Film Archive since 1970, and in 1972 the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis moved in, bringing together scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain.