Laudon Palace

Laudon Palace in Vienna, Austria, occupies the site of an early medieval fortified residence established by local lords in the High Middle Ages. The place is first recorded around 1130 and the complex reached its present Baroque appearance in the mid-18th century; it later became closely associated with Field Marshal Ernst Gideon von Laudon and with military events that affected the region. The building served as a noble residence, an administrative house for local forest officials, and later as a private estate and institutional property.

From its origins until the mid-14th century the manor belonged to a succession of regional lords; around 1130 the lords of Hadersdorf held the site and a fortification probably stood where the palace now rises. In 1358 the estate passed to the territorial ruler, who installed the local forester there as the palace’s resident administrator. During the 16th century the structure suffered destruction in the Ottoman campaign of 1529 and was rebuilt in the years after that fighting. Ownership changed in the following decades, passing to the Teuffenbach family in 1551 and to Sigmund von Hohenburg zu Pranckh in 1588.

The palace again felt the effect of Ottoman warfare during the 1683 campaign; after that damage it was reconstructed in an early Baroque, moated form under the direction of the imperial court. In 1654 the estate had briefly entered the imperial household when Eleonora of Mantua, wife of Emperor Ferdinand III, acquired it. In 1708 Elisabeth Christine, later the wife of Emperor Charles VI, lodged at the house for two nights, an event commemorated by a Latin chronogram carved in the stairwell. A substantial remodelling that gave the palace its current external character was completed in 1744 under the ownership of Franz Wilhelm Schellerer.

In 1776 Field Marshal Ernst Gideon von Laudon purchased the property and lived there until his death in 1790; the Laudon family kept the palace until 1925. After that year it passed into the hands of industrialist Otto Pollack von Parnegg; following 1938 the estate was subjected to the Nazi practice of “Aryanization.” Soviet occupation forces used the site from 1945 to 1955. In 1960 the sons of Pollack‑Parnegg sold the palace to the Archdiocese of Vienna, which dispersed much of the furniture at auction and then sold the property the same year to Alfred Weiss. Weiss restored the building and operated it as a luxury hotel between 1962 and 1973. From 1976 the Republic of Austria leased the property and it housed the Federal Administrative Academy; the FH Campus Wien Department Public Sector occupied the separate Octagon building in the palace park until the 2022/23 academic year. The palace is not open to the public. A large quantity of the palace’s furniture and works of art was scheduled for auction on 2 July 2024.