A name without a title
New money called its buildings Palais to borrow the dignity of nobility.
Erich Schmid — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Buchhändler — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Buchhändler — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Magistrat der Stadt Wien, MA 18 / Richard Macho — CC BY-SA 3.0
No, and this is a common mistake. The genuine Baroque palaces in the 1st district date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were built for noble families. Many Ringstrasse-era buildings of the nineteenth century carry the same name and are apartment blocks for the new industrial class. The date separates them: before 1800, or after 1860.
The city hall the square sits behind, one of the major Ringstrasse buildings, which can be visited on a tour. The whole quarter — city hall, parliament, university and Burgtheater — went up in the same decades and reads as a single project.
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A grand apartment building of 1883 on Friedrich-Schmidt-Platz behind the city hall, carrying the title Palais although it is not an aristocratic palace at all. That naming is the useful thing about it. When Vienna's walls came down in the 1860s and the Ringstrasse was cut, hundreds of large residential buildings went up around it for a new class of industrialists, bankers and merchants. Many were called Palais, a word that had belonged to the nobility, because their owners wanted the dignity of the name without holding the title. So the word Palais in Vienna signals neither Baroque nor nobility. A building of this kind has grand apartments, marble staircases and a facade borrowing the vocabulary of the Italian Renaissance, but it was built to be let rather than lived in by one family. The square itself is of the same moment: laid out around the new city hall designed by Friedrich Schmidt and named after him. The whole quarter is a single planning exercise, which you can read in the even heights of its buildings. A plain practical point: the building is residential and administrative and is not visitable inside. The visit is minutes in front of the facade if you are at the city hall anyway.
New money called its buildings Palais to borrow the dignity of nobility.
Grand apartments for rent, not one family's seat as a true palace was.
The square, the city hall and the buildings around them are one planning exercise.
Friedrich-Schmidt-Platz, behind Vienna's city hall