Otto Wagner

Otto Koloman Wagner
Personal information
Name	Otto Koloman Wagner
Nationality	Austria-Hungarian
Birth date	July 13 1841(1841-07-13)
Birth place	Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Date of death	April 11 1918 (aged 76)
Place of death	Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Work
Significant buildings	Floodgate, Nußdorf, Vienna Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station Majolica house Postal Office Savings Bank Building Kirche am Steinhof Rumbach Synagogue
Significant projects	Viennese Wiener Stadtbahn

Otto Koloman Wagner (13 July 1841 – 11 April 1918) was an Austrian architect. Wagner was born in Penzing, a suburb of Vienna. He studied in Berlin and Vienna. In 1864, he started designing his first buildings in the historicist style. In the mid- and late-1880s, like many of his contemporaries in Germany (such as Constantin Lipsius, Richard Streiter and Georg Heuser), Switzerland (Hans Auer and Alfred Friedrich Bluntschli) and France (Paul Sédille), Wagner became a proponent of Architectural Realism. It was a theoretical position that enabled him to mitigate the reliance on historical forms. In 1894, when he became Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, he was well advanced on his path toward a more radical opposition to the prevailing currents of historicist architecture.

Wohnhaus in the Neustiftgasse, Vienna

Metro bridge

Postsparkasse

By the mid-1890s, he had already designed several Jugendstil buildings. Wagner was very interested in urban planning - in 1890 he designed a new city plan for Vienna, but only his urban rail network, the Stadtbahn, was built. In 1896 he published a textbook entitled Modern Architecture in which he expressed his ideas about the role of the architect; it was based on the text of his 1894 inaugural lecture to the Academy. His style incorporated the use of new materials and new forms to reflect the fact that society itself was changing. In his textbook, he stated that "new human tasks and views called for a change or reconstitution of existing forms". In pursuit of this ideal, he designed and built structures that reflected their intended function, such as the austere Neustiftgasse apartment block in Vienna. In 1897, Otto Wagner, Gustav Klimt, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser founded the "Vienna Secession" artistic group. From the ideas of this group he developed a style that included quasi-symbolic references to the new forms of modernity. Wagner died in Vienna in 1918.

Major works

• Floodgate, Nußdorf, Vienna, built in 1894
• Viennese Wiener Stadtbahn, metropolitan railway system (1894-1902), e.g. Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station
• Majolica house, Vienna (1898-1899)
• Postal Office Savings Bank Building, Vienna (1894-1902) (Video of Model)
• Kirche am Steinhof, Vienna (1903-1907).
• Rumbach Synagogue, Budapest

Publications

• Wagner, Otto (1988). Modern Architecture: A Guidebook for His Students to This Field of Art, Trans. Harry F. Mallgrave, Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. ISBN 0226869385. 

External links

• Otto Wagner Museum in Vienna
• Great Buildings Online
• Images of several Wagner buildings
• Otto Wagner at WOKA (de/en)
• Majolica House in Vienna by Otto Wagner (with drawings and photos)

References

• Mallgrave (ed.), Harry (1993). Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity. Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. ISBN 089236257X. 
• Duncan Berry, J. (1993). "From Historicism to Architectural Realism: On Some of Wagner’s Sources", in Harry Mallgrave: Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity. Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 242-278. ISBN 089236257X. 
• Graf, Otto Antonia (1994). Otto Wagner: Das Werk des Architekten 1860-1918 (in german). Vienna: Bölhau. ISBN 320598224X. 
• Kolb, Günter (1989). Otto Wagner Und Die Wiener Stadtbahn (in german). Munich: Scaneg. ISBN 3892350299. 
• Schorske, Carl (1981). "The Ringstrasse and the Birth of Urban Modernism", Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0394744780. 
• Muller, Ines (1992). Die Otto Wagner-Synagoge in Budapest (in german). Wien: Löcker. ISBN 9783854092001.