Wagner, Otto

Wagner, Otto (ôt`ō väg`nər), 1841–1918, Austrian architect. A structural rationalism was exhibited in his stations for the Vienna city railroad, built in the 1890s. His later works, showing an individual and monumental style, include the Vienna Postal Savings Building and the Steinhof Church (1906). He became a professor at the Imperial Academy of Art in 1894. His many executed designs, his projects, his teaching, and his Moderne Architektur, of which there were four editions (1896–1914), were all widely influential both in Austria and abroad.

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Wagner, Otto

(born July 13, 1841, Penzing, near Vienna, Austrian Empire—died April 11, 1918, Vienna) Austrian architect and teacher. In 1893 his general plan (not executed) for Vienna won a major competition, and in 1894 he was appointed professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. As a teacher, Wagner soon broke with tradition by insisting on function, material, and structure as the bases of architectural design. Among his notable buildings, all in the Art Nouveau style, are a number of stations for the City Railway of Vienna (1894–97) and the Postal Savings Bank (1904–06). The latter, which had little decoration, is recognized as a milestone in the history of modern architecture, particularly for the curving glass roof of its central hall. Wagner's lectures were published in 1895 as Moderne Architektur.

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Wagner, Otto 

Born July 13, 1841, in Vienna; died there on Apr. 11, 1918. Austrian architect.

Wagner was a representative of the Viennese art nouveau and a member of the Vienna Secession. He moved from the construction of buildings that were intricate in composition and replete with elaborate decor (the Steinhof Hospital in Vienna, 1904-07) to a search for rationality and simplicity. Wagner’s interior of a building for a post office and savings bank (Vienna, 1904-06) showed him to be a forerunner of functionalism—he used nondecorative, geometrically precise forms and bare metal structure.

REFERENCE

Ostwald, H. Otto Wagner. Baden, 1948.