Otto Wagner

Otto Wagner built Vienna’s city railway, the Postal Savings Bank and the church Am Steinhof. He demanded a modern architecture for a modern age and taught a whole generation of Viennese architects, among them Olbrich and Hoffmann.

Otto Wagner was born in 1841 in Penzing near Vienna. He studied at the Vienna Polytechnic, at the Bauakademie in Berlin and at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. In his first decades he built apartment blocks and banks in a historicist style along the Ringstraße. In 1894 he became professor at the Academy, and in 1896 he published the book Moderne Architektur, in which he argued that architecture must start from the needs, materials and construction of its own time.

Between 1894 and 1901 Wagner designed Vienna’s city railway, with stations, bridges and viaducts, among them the pavilions on Karlsplatz with their green iron frames and marble slabs. He joined the Vienna Secession in 1899 and built the Majolikahaus with tiled flowers on its façade. The Postal Savings Bank, 1904–1912, is built with slabs fixed with aluminium rivets, and its banking hall has a glass roof and glass floor. The church Am Steinhof, at a psychiatric hospital, has a gilded dome and a bright interior designed to be easy to keep clean.

Wagner died in Vienna in 1918. His school at the Academy trained many of the most important architects in Central Europe, among them Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann and Jože Plečnik. His ideas of an architecture grounded in construction and use made him a forerunner of modernism. His book and his buildings also became known in the Nordic countries, where architects around 1900 took inspiration from the Vienna school.

• Majolikahaus
• Austrian Postal Savings Bank