Majolikahaus

Otto Wagner’s apartment building by the Naschmarkt has a façade covered in glazed tiles with roses and winding plants. The building has a simple, flat form, but its surface is one great floral pattern that withstands weather and dirt. It is the Art Nouveau of the Vienna Secession in its most colourful form.

Otto Wagner was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and one of the driving forces of renewal around the turn of the century. He argued that the modern city required a new architecture, honest to materials and use, and he designed Vienna’s Stadtbahn, churches and the Postsparkasse savings bank. The Majolikahaus and its neighbour were built in 1898–1899 along the new Wienzeile, a boulevard Wagner had planned himself.

The tiles, majolica, were practical: the façade could be washed and kept its colours. At the same time they turned the building into a work of art in which the ornament does not sit on the wall but is the wall. The neighbouring building was given gold medallions by Koloman Moser, one of the founders of the Secession. Wagner then moved towards an ever more austere style, and his pupils, such as Josef Hoffmann, led Vienna into modernism.

• Art Nouveau
• Otto Wagner