Austrian Postal Savings Bank
Otto Wagner’s Postal Savings Bank was a bank for ordinary people and was given a building that was to be modern, hygienic and clear. The façade is clad in marble slabs fixed with aluminium rivets. The banking hall has a glass roof and a glass floor, so that light reaches down to the basement.
The Austrian Postal Savings Bank was founded in 1883 so that people on small incomes could also save money. Otto Wagner won the competition for a new head office, and the building was erected in two phases, 1904–1906 and 1910–1912. Wagner was then one of Vienna’s leading architects and a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts. He had long argued for a modern architecture based on new materials and present-day needs.
The façade is clad in thin marble slabs held in place by rivets with aluminium heads. The rivets were first used to hold the slabs while the mortar set, but they also became a decorative pattern. Aluminium was then a new material, and Wagner also used it in railings, heating units and furniture. The banking hall in the middle has a vaulted glass roof carried by slender iron columns and a floor of glass tiles. Everything is simple, bright and easy to clean, and most of the furnishings were designed by Wagner himself.
The Postal Savings Bank is regarded as one of the most important buildings of early modernism. It shows how Wagner moved from the ornament of the Vienna Secession towards a new objectivity, in which construction and material became the basis of form. The bank has moved out, and the building is now used among others by the University of Applied Arts. The banking hall has been preserved.