Explore Vienna in Google Street View

Vienna's defining decision was made in 1857, when the emperor ordered the city walls demolished and replaced not with buildings but with a boulevard. The Ringstrasse is a five kilometre circuit around the old centre, and the great public buildings of the late empire were placed along it in a deliberate sequence: parliament in Greek revival, city hall in Gothic, the university in Renaissance style, the Burgtheater in baroque. Each style was chosen to argue something about the institution inside.

Following the Ring in Street View is therefore an unusually structured experience. It is a loop, it is continuous, and every few hundred metres there is a monumental building with a park in front of it. Very few cities offer a single route that covers this much of what they are about.

Inside the Ring, the old centre is medieval and tight, and St Stephen's Cathedral sits in the middle of it with a roof of glazed tiles laid in a pattern. The tiles are the detail worth zooming into: two hundred and thirty thousand of them, arranged into coats of arms, and rebuilt after a fire in 1945.

The palaces are on two scales. The Hofburg is in the middle of the city and grew by accretion over six centuries, so it reads as several buildings that have run into each other. Schönbrunn is out to the west, built as a summer residence, symmetrical and enormous, with gardens rising to a colonnade on the hill behind. Both were captured on foot in their courtyards and grounds.

For everyday Vienna, look at the social housing. The city built enormous municipal complexes in the 1920s, and Karl-Marx-Hof is over a kilometre long, a single continuous residential building with courtyards and archways through it. It is still lived in, still municipal, and it is one of the most remarkable things you can see from a tram stop anywhere.

One quiet pleasure here is the coffee house. They are protected as cultural heritage, and the ones that survive have marble tables, bentwood chairs and newspapers on racks. Several of the famous ones have interior imagery, which is worth checking for, because the interior is the entire point of the institution.