Otto Wagner
Austrian architect and urban planner
1841 CE to 1918 CE
Otto Koloman Wagner (July 13, 1841 – April 11, 1918) is an Austrian architect and urban planner.
He is a leading member of the Vienna Secession movement of architecture, founded in 1897, and the broader Art Nouveau movement.
All of his works are found in his native city of Vienna, and illustrate the rapid evolution of architecture during the period.
His early works are inspired by classical architecture
By mid-1890s, he had already designed several buildings in what becomes known as the Vienna Secession style.
Beginning in 1898, with his designs of Vienna Metro stations, his style becomes floral and Art Nouveau, with decoration by Koloman Moser.
His later works, 1906 until his death in 1918, have geometric forms and minimal ornament, clearly expressing their function.
They are considered predecessors to modern architecture.
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Led by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, thirty-six, the members are influenced by William Morris, Walter Crane, and Charles Voysey and also adopt the British aesthetic for their handcrafted products.
The fifty-seven-year-old Wagner, as adviser to the Transport Commission in Vienna, is occupied from 1894 to 1898 with the construction of the Stadtbahn, the city's metropolitan railway network.
He designs bridges and tunnels for this system, as well as the stations, with their complex of platforms, staircases, and ticket offices.
Many of these stations, like Wagner's so-called Majolica House of the same year, use elements of art nouveau (or Jugendstil).
In the Majolica House, Wagner's decorative exploitation of the architectural surface with flexible, S-shaped linear ornament associates the Majolica House with the Sezessionstil, as do its decorative iron balconies and colored ceramic floral designs (the latter designed by Wagner's student Alois Ludwig).
Its blocklike simplicity is relieved by the floral Art Nouveau decoration used on the metal cupola.
Educated in Dresden, Loos had spent the years 1893-97 in the United States and now practices in Vienna ta twenty-eight.
The white and gold facade also resembles Olbrich's Secession Building.
Otto Wagner continues to combine academic geometry with classical modified Art Nouveau decoration in his Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station (1899-1901).
The buildings above ground on Karlsplatz are a well-known example of Jugendstil architecture.
These buildings are included in the Vienna Secession, as they follow many of the artistic styles of that movement.
Designed by Wagner, adviser to the Transport Commission in Vienna, and Joseph Maria Olbrich, they are, unlike the other Stadtbahn stations, made of a steel framework with marble slabs mounted on the exterior.
These stations allow Wagner to achieve his goal of creating two modern axes of architecture in a city that is becoming one of the most modern cities of its time.
These buildings will go on to become the most modern monument of the modern city.