Day six: Wien - Technisches Museum Wien and Beethoven Pasqualatihaus

We always try to visit a technology or science museum wherever we go. This trip is no different. We went to the Technisches Museum Wien (Vienna Technology Museum) today. This majestic building was specifically built as a museum of trade and industry during the reign of Kaiser Franz Joseph I, and was not a conversion from some imperial residence. Once we entered the main building, we were greeted by the vast open space in the main foyer.


The exhibits are excellent at TMW. We started from the section on musical instruments on the top floor. The kids learned about pipe organs and played various types of keyboard instruments, such as the harpsichord. The pictures of some of the instruments (and other exhibitions at TMW) can be found here.

We worked our way down the building, and saw many excellent exhibits in telecommunication, computing, appliances, locomotive, power generation, scientific instruments and the human body. The kids had a lot of fun at a mock TV broadcast booth and spent quite a bit of time playing with a computerized version of Enigma, an encryption and decryption machine that was used most notably by Nazi Germany during WWII.


We left TMW in mid-afternoon. After a short stop at a nearby ice-cream parlor, we headed to the Beethoven Pasqualatihaus, an apartment where Beethoven lived for 8 years and where he composed his 4th, 5th, 7th and 8th symphonies and Fidelio. Unlike the Mozarthaus or the Haydnhaus, which occupy a whole building, the Beethoven Pasqualatihaus is a small museum on the fourth floor of the building. There are other residents on other floors of the buildings. In this museum the displays do not have much narratives and most of them are identical to those at Mozarthaus and Haydnhaus.