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Otto Wagner

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Otto Wagner
Born
Otto Koloman Wagner

(1841-07-13)13 July 1841
Vienna, Austrian Empire
Died11 April 1918(1918-04-11) (aged 76)
Vienna, Austria-Hungary
NationalityAustro-Hungarian
OccupationArchitect
Parents
  • Rudolf Simeon Wagner (father)
  • Suzanne von Helffenstorffer-Hueber (mother)
BuildingsFloodgate, Nußdorf, Vienna

Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station
Majolica House
Postal Office Savings Bank Building

Kirche am Steinhof
Rumbach Synagogue
ProjectsViennese Wiener Stadtbahn

Otto Koloman Wagner (German: [ˈɔto ˈvaːɡnɐ] ⓘ; 13 July 1841 – 11 April 1918) was an Austro-Hungarian architect and urban planner, known for his lasting impact on the appearance of his home town Vienna, to which he contributed many landmarks.

Life and career

Wagner was born in Penzing, a district in Vienna. He was the son of Suzanne (née von Helffenstorffer-Hueber) and Rudolf Simeon Wagner, a notary to the Royal Hungarian Court.[1][2][3] 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.

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.

Exterior
Exterior
Interior
Interior
Wagner Villa

In 1897, he joined Gustav Klimt, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser shortly after they 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

The Austrian Postal Savings Bank building by Otto Wagner, constructed between 1904 and 1906 using reinforced concrete, regarded as an important early work of modern architecture, representing Wagner's first move away from Art Nouveau and Neoclassicism.
Austria
Hungary
Major Works of Otto Wagner in Vienna, Austria
Majolica House
Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station
Postal Office Savings Bank Building

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 0-226-86938-5.

References

  1. ^ Slesin, Suzanne; Cliff, Stafford; Rozensztroch, Daniel (25 October 1994). Mittel Europa: rediscovering the style and design of Central Europe. C. Potter. Retrieved 16 July 2012.
  2. ^ Wagner, Otto (1987). Graf, Otto Antonia (ed.). Masterdrawings of Otto Wagner: an exhibition of the Otto Wagner-Archiv, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. The Drawing Center. Retrieved 16 July 2012.
  3. ^ "Otto Koloman Wagner - Vienna 1900". depts.washington.edu. 2003. Retrieved 16 July 2012.

Further reading

  • 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 0-89236-257-X. {{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  • Duncan Berry, J. (1993). "From Historicism to Architectural Realism: On Some of Wagner's Sources". In Harry Mallgrave (ed.). Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity. Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. pp. 242–278. ISBN 0-89236-257-X.
  • Graf, Otto Antonia (1994). Otto Wagner: Das Werk des Architekten 1860-1918 (in German). Vienna: Bölhau. ISBN 3-205-98224-X.
  • Kolb, Günter (1989). Otto Wagner Und Die Wiener Stadtbahn (in German). Munich: Scaneg. ISBN 3-89235-029-9.
  • Schorske, Carl (1981). "The Ringstrasse and the Birth of Urban Modernism". Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-394-74478-0.
  • Muller, Ines (1992). Die Otto Wagner-Synagoge in Budapest (in German). Wien: Löcker. ISBN 978-3-85409-200-1.
  • Geretsegger, Heinz (1979). Otto Wagner, 1841-1989; the Expanding City; The Beginning of Modern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli. ISBN 0-8478-0217-5.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Otto Wagner.

Digitized books from the architecture collection of AMS Historica, the digital library of the University of Bologna.


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