Jean Nouvel's iridescent glass tower rising over Leopoldstadt's Ringstrasse-era rooflines is about as confrontational a statement as contemporary Vienna permits — a deep-blue curtain wall grid that reflects the sky by day and glows amber from within at dusk, set in deliberate tension with the stuccoed Historicist facades crowding its base. SO/ Vienna, which opened in 2012 within the seventeen-floor Sofitel Vienna Stephansdom tower, gave Nouvel the opportunity to position a landmark building at the intersection of the old city and the second district, with the spire of Stephansdom framed precisely in the horizontal slot windows of the upper guest rooms. The interiors were divided between two designers whose briefs could hardly be more different. Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance handled the lower-level bar, where a multi-panel backlit installation of coloured glass panels — amber, chartreuse, magenta — anchors a lounge dressed in powder-blue curved banquettes and cardinal-red carpet. Atop the tower, the rooftop restaurant Le Loft carries a vast Pipilotti Rist ceiling artwork, its blaze of orange and crimson paint suspended above grey upholstered booth seating and floor-to-ceiling glass. The 182 guest rooms, designed by the Sofitel brand's in-house team, keep things quieter: poured-resin floors in pale grey, wall panels in taupe, and boxy upholstered armchairs framing city panoramas that give Vienna's baroque density a newly vertiginous dimension.

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