Otto Wagner Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Otto Wagner (1841-1918) was an Austrian architect, urban planner and teacher who led Vienna from historicism to modern architecture. His stations for the Vienna Stadtbahn, the Majolica House, the Austrian Postal Savings Bank and the Church of St Leopold at Steinhof combine new materials such as aluminium and glass with refined ornament, and his book Moderne Architektur and his school at the Academy shaped a generation that included Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Jože Plečnik.

Historicism and the Ringstrasse

Wagner was born in Penzing, near Vienna, in 1841 and studied in Vienna and at the Bauakademie in Berlin. For three decades he worked in the historicist styles of the Ringstrasse era, building apartment houses and banks.

Modern architecture for a modern city

In 1894 he was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and chief architect of the Vienna Stadtbahn, for which he designed bridges, viaducts and stations, including the pavilions at Karlsplatz (1899). In 1896 he published Moderne Architektur, arguing that architecture should express modern life and construction, and in 1899 he joined the Vienna Secession. The Majolica House (1899) faced its facade with flowered tiles.

The Postal Savings Bank and Steinhof

The Austrian Postal Savings Bank (1904-1906, extended to 1912) has a facade of marble panels fixed with aluminium bolts and a banking hall under a glass roof. The Church of St Leopold at the Steinhof psychiatric hospital (1907) crowns a hill with a gilded dome. Wagner died in Vienna in 1918.