Wagner, Otto

Education and career start

Grabenhof, 1874-1877 - typical Viennese eclecticism

Otto Wagner was born into the family of a successful court notary in Penzing (today - the district of Vienna adjacent to the imperial residence Schönbrunn ). Father died when Otto was five years old. Despite the need, his mother managed to give him a decent education. In 1857-1862 Wagner studied first at the Vienna Polytechnic , then at the Academy of Fine Arts . In 1862, Wagner got an apprentice at the company of the architect Heinrich Förster (son of Ludwig Förster , the builder of Ringstrasse ). In 1864, Förster entrusted Wagner with his first independent work - the management of the construction of the main pavilion ( de: Kursalon Hübner ) in the Vienna city park . In the next two decades, Wagner successfully built alien and his own projects in the style of late eclecticism . At the turn of the 1870s - 1880s, Wagner created a ton of projects; he realized some of them as an independent developer, but on the whole this stage of his work remains poorly studied. The first printed collection of his projects came out in 1890.

The Age of Art Nouveau

In the mid-1890s, Wagner moved away from eclectic historicism - to modernity. Unlike the leading architects of modernity, who at that time were just beginning their professional activities ( Victor Horta , Charles Renny Mackintosh , L.N. Kekushev - a generation born in the 1860s), Wagner found the birth of modernity already being a well-known, commercially successful architect and builder . His students founded a successful association of supporters of the new style, the Vienna Secession , while Wagner himself built relatively little during this period. He himself joined the secession movement only in 1899.

Since 1894, when Wagner was involved in the planning of Vienna Stadtbahn, he focused on large urban development and infrastructure projects. His project for the reconstruction of the southern regions of Vienna (from Ringstrasse to the Vienna River in the south and to Schönbrunn in the west) of 1892-1893 was not implemented (only two houses were built along the Wienzeile promenade and the Naschmarkt market was planned). Wagner managed to complete an equally large-scale project - the architectural part of the city railway (Stadtbana), most of which remains to this day, as well as a protective waterworks on the Vienna River . In 1900-1908 Wagner consistently created four competitive projects of the Museum of Vienna; contests were marked by scandals and an irreconcilable clash of different creative schools. As a result, the building was never built during the life of the architect; The modern Vienna Museum on Karlsplatz is a modest building in the spirit of the 1960s.

Features of Wagner's architecture of this period are the desire to simplify the forms of buildings (smooth walls, dissected by verticals of flat risalits and pilasters ), combined with the characteristic Wagnerian “gold” decor and the widespread use of wrought iron. The color scheme is a white or light gray base, decorated with a neutral gray, dark green and (or) gold decor. The traditional Wagnerian detail - thin parallel vertical flutes along the surface of a flat pilaster - was instantly replicated by modern architects.

Late Period

Wagner's most notable buildings date from the 1900s, when the architect completed the design of Stadtbahn. In 1904-1906 he builds from concrete and aluminum, in 1904-1907 - the church of Am Steinhof . In those same years, Wagner designed similar public buildings for The Hague , San Francisco and other cities, as well as the Peace Temple in Vienna (1918). The largest realized project of those years was a hospital in a suburb of Vienna (the modern Otto-Wagner-Spital (1906-1910s).

Personal life

In 1863, at the insistence of his mother, Otto married for the first time, and had two daughters from this marriage. Simultaneously with this marriage, he cohabited for many years with Sophia Paupi (1840-1912), who also bore him two children; Wagner officially adopted them in 1882, after a divorce. In 1884 he married a second time, in this marriage three children were born. The second wife, Louise Stiefl, was 18 years younger than Wagner and died early, in 1915.

He was buried in the Hitzing cemetery .

Wagnerian style in Russian architecture:

• Ivanov-Shits, Illarion Aleksandrovich
• Mashkov, Ivan Pavlovich

• short biography
• German: short biography
• German: Otto Wagner Museum
• German: Stadtbahn Otto Wagner
• Suburban Line Architecture S45
• (German) Einige skizzen 1 , Wien, 1905.
• (German) Einige skizzen 2 , Wien, 1905.
• (German) Einige skizzen 3 , Wien, 1905.