Otto Wagner
Otto Koloman Wagner was an Austrian architect, furniture designer and urban planner. He was a leading member of the Vienna Secession movement of architecture, founded in 1897, and the broader Art Nouveau movement. Many of his works are found in his native city of Vienna, and illustrate the rapid evolution of architecture during the period. His early works were inspired by classical architecture. By mid-1890s, he had already designed several buildings in what became known as the Vienna Secession style. Beginning in 1898, with his designs of Vienna Metro stations, his style became floral and Art Nouveau, with decoration by Koloman Moser. His later works, 1906 until his death in 1918, had geometric forms and minimal ornament, more clearly expressing their modern structure and materials. Although they are considered predecessors to modern architecture they remain within the larger classical tradition of the Schinkel School in Germany and Central Europe.
Education and early career
Wagner was born in 1841 in Penzing, a district in Vienna. He was the son of Suzanne and Rudolf Simeon Wagner, a notary to the Royal Hungarian Court. He began his architectural studies in 1857 at the age of sixteen at the Vienna Polytechnic Institute. When he finished his studies there, in 1860 he traveled to Berlin and studied at the Royal Academy of Architecture under Carl Ferdinand Busse, a classicist and student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the leader of the German school of classical and Gothic architecture. He returned to Vienna in 1861 and continued his architectural education at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, under August Sicard von von Sicardsburg and Edouard von der Nüll, who had designed the neoclassical Vienna State Opera and the architectural monuments along the Vienna Ringstraße.In 1862, at the age of 22, he joined the architectural firm of Ludwig von Förster, whose studio had designed much of the new architecture along the Ringstraße. The first part of his career was devoted to the transformation of that boulevard into a showcase of neo-Gothic, neo-Renassiance, and neoclassical styles. During this period, which lasted until about 1880, he described his own style as "a sort of free Renaissance".
His first realized major project was the Orthodox Synagogue on Rumbach Street in Budapest. His design was selected in a competition held in 1868, when he was twenty-seven years old. The octagonal hall of the synagogue was concealed behind a four-story structure facing the street. The hall was filled with light from stained glass windows on the octagonal lantern above, and large circular windows in each of the eight bays. On the first floor above the ground floor was an octagonal gallery reserved for women. The facade was made of brick of different colors, and was decorated with minarets and towers with a Moorish appearance, while the interior featured colorful patterns of mosaic slender on the walls and highly decorated columns which supported arches over each of the bays.
He began to develop his philosophy of architecture, based on the need for buildings to be, above all, functional. He continued to develop this idea throughout his career. In 1896, in his book Modern Architecture, he wrote, "Only that which is practical can be beautiful".
Early projects, and the First Villa Wagner (1880s)
In the 1880s, he began to construct buildings of which he was both the architect and investor in the project, sharing in the financial benefits. In 1882 he designed a luxury apartment building on Stadiongasse in Vienna, close to the Parliament and the city hall. The facade was inspired by the Renaissance, but the interior was designed to be highly practical, luxurious, and constructed with the highest quality materials available. The benefits of this building allowed him to build several more similar apartment buildings. It illustrated his doctrine of the connection between beauty and function.His next major project was the headquarters of the Länderbank in Vienna. He won the design competition in 1882 and built it in 1883–84. It was built on a very irregular site, mostly at an angle to the street, which allowed him to be more creative. The five-story Renaissance facade gave little idea of the complexity of the building behind it, which had multiple diverging axes. The visitor passed through a circular vestibule, then turned at an angle into multi-storied semi-circular central hall with a glass skylight, where the banking function was located. He also used new materials, such as an enduit lisse, and much larger windows than were customary in the period, repeated the plan on each floor. He later described his approach to the building: "The demands for air and light, the desire to assure easy circulation and orientation inside the space, and especially the fact that the activities of a bank can develop on one direction or another, made it desirable to be able to easily transform the work spaces." He was to follow the same concepts twenty years later when he designed the Postal Savings Bank in Vienna.
The following project, in 1886, was the first Villa Wagner, a country house he built for himself on the edge of the Vienna woods. He called it his "Italian Dream", and it had neoclassical elements inspired by Palladio. it was surrounded by a park carefully designed to complement the architecture. The principal facade had a double stairway ascending to a portico with a colonnade, which was the entrance to the grand salon. The porch was decorated curving wrought iron, statuary, and a coffered ceiling. At either end of the main villa were pergolas with open colonnades. On either side of the main stairway to the entrance he placed plaques in Latin concisely stating his philosophy On one side, "Without art and love, there is no life"; and on the other, "Necessity is the sole mistress of art." In 1895, he modified the house. One of the pergolas was transformed from a winter garden into a billiards room, illuminated by floral stained glass windows, one designed by the painter Adolf Michael Boehm. The other pergola was made into his studio, also with colorful decorative windows.
Two more of his buildings appeared on the boulevards of Vienna. The first, completed in 1887, was a six-story apartment building on Universitätsstrase, which had a rigorous vertical facade divided by ornamental pilasters, divided horizontally by a very ornate wrought iron balcony on the first floor and a sculpted cornice beneath the roof, dividing the facade into three distinct parts. The second was the Zum Anker building on Spiegelgasse, and the Graben, the historic boulevard in the heart of the city. This building, completed in 1894, combined apartments on the upper floors, and stores on the street level, bearing large display windows. On top was another glass structure, like a small temple, which contained a photography studio. It was another notable example of Wagner skillfully adapting the design of the building to its practical functions.
Wagner always fought against the idea of historicism which helped Vienna of that time to sway over and come up to its notable architectural achievement, the Ringstrasse Boulevard. He had a chance to deliver a speech at Academy of Fine Arts in 1894, where he said that, "The realism of our time must penetrate the work of art."
Urban planning and the Vienna ''Stadtbahn'' (1894–1900)
In the 1890s, Wagner became increasingly interested in urban planning. Vienna was growing rapidly; it reached a population of 1,590,000 residents in 1898. In 1890, the city government decided to expand the urban transit system outwards to the new neighborhoods. In April 1894, Wagner was named artistic counselor for the new Stadtbahn and gradually was given responsibility for the design of the bridges, viaducts, and stations, including the elevators, signs, lighting, and decoration. Wagner hired seventy artists and designers for his transit stations, including two young designers who later became very prominent in the birth of modern architecture, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann.The government committee in charge of the project specified that the buildings should be covered in white plaster, for uniformity, and that the style should be Renaissance, also for uniformity. Working within these requirements, Wagner designed stations and other structures which combined utility, simplicity and elegance. The most notable station he designed was Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station. It had two separate pavilions, one for each direction, and was constructed with a metal frame, and covered on the exterior with marble plaques and plaster plaques in the interior. The exterior was covered with designs in a sunflower pattern, which continue on the semi-circular facade. The carefully designed gilded decoration gives the building a remarkable combination of functionality and elegance.
The Vienna Secession
In 1894, he became Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and increasingly expressed the necessity of leaving behind historical forms and romanticism and developing Architectural Realism, where the form was determined by the function of the building. 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". He wrote in his manifesto on Modern Architecture, "Art and artists have the duty and obligation to represent their period. The application here and there of all the previous styles, as we have seen in the last few decades, cannot be the future of architecture...The realism of our time must be present in every newborn work of art.In 1897, he aligned himself with Vienna Secession, a movement started by fifty Vienna artists formally known as the Association of Austrian plastic artists. Its founding members included Gustav Klimt, its first President, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, and Koloman Moser. The Secession declared war on the historicism and realism decreed by the Arts academies, and called for the abolition of the boundary between the fine arts and the applied and decorative arts. of architecture and art. Its goal was proclaimed by Wagner's student, Olbrich: "To each epoch its own art, and to each art its freedom." The most famous architectural work of the Secession, Olbrich's Secession Building showed Wagner's influence. However, after the success of Secession works at the 1900 Paris Exposition, many of the members wanted to produce furniture and other Secession designs in series, and disputed the direction of the Secession. The dispute reached a head in 1905, when one of the prominent painters of the Secession, Carl Moll, proposed that the Secession purchase a prominent Vienna art gallery as an outlet for the Secession artists. This was opposed by the more traditional artists in the group. It was put to a vote of the members of the Secession, and Klimt's position was defeated by a single vote. Klimt, Wagner, Moser, and Hoffmann promptly resigned from the Secession.
Wagner had a strong influence on his pupils at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. This "Wagner School" included Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Karl Ehn, Jože Plečnik, and Max Fabiani. Another student of Wagner's was Rudolph Schindler, who said "Modern Architecture began with Mackintosh in Scotland, Otto Wagner in Vienna, and Louis Sullivan in Chicago."