Vienna, 1904. In the Georg-Coch-Platz, a few steps from the Ring, work begins on the Postal Savings Bank (Postsparkasse). The building that will emerge two years later has a façade clad in slabs of white marble, fixed to the masonry with aluminium bolts left visible: small shiny studs, arranged in rows, that hide nothing. Their very design says it: in this building construction is not disguised, it is shown. Its designer is sixty-three years old and is the most influential professor of architecture at the Vienna Academy: Otto Wagner.
From the Ring to the modern city
Wagner is born in Vienna in 1841 and trains in the climate of nineteenth-century eclecticism, that of the Ring palaces imitating Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque according to function. For decades he builds that way, successfully. Then, in 1894, he is appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1896 he publishes Moderne Architektur, a manual for students that becomes a manifesto: modern architecture must come from the needs of its time, from materials and construction, and not from a historical tradition. One line of the book sums up his position: only what is practical can be beautiful.
In 1894 he receives the most important commission of his career: designing the stations of the new urban railway, the Stadtbahn, an infrastructure that covers part of the city and links the centre to the outskirts. He directs an enormous piece of work, with dozens of stations, bridges and iron viaducts, and gives it all a unified language. Among them, the two pavilions of the Karlsplatz station (1899) are the most famous: a steel frame clad in white marble slabs, with gilded floral decoration and a green copper barrel roof. They are the meeting of modern construction and Art Nouveau decoration: the steel is visible, the flower is not, but it is gilded.
The Secession and the most hygienic church in Europe
In 1899 Wagner joins the Vienna Secession, the group of artists around Klimt that rejects the Academy's official art, and that already has its own pavilion by Olbrich (with the laurel dome) a few steps from the Wienzeile. The same year he completes the Majolikahaus, an apartment building at number 40 Linke Wienzeile: the façade is covered in majolica tiles painted with pink and green branches and flowers, a practical way of making the façade washable and at once decorative. And this is precisely Wagner's position: decoration arises from function, it does not mask it.
The Postsparkasse (1904–06) is his masterpiece. The marble façade has its slabs fixed with aluminium bolts, a metal then brand new, and the great customer hall has a glass ceiling supported by slender metal columns, with a floor of glass slabs that lets light pass to the level below. Even the heating pipes are designed as part of the project. There is no added ornament: there is a building that shows how it works. Adolf Loos, who is at once Wagner's heir and critic, could ask for nothing more.
His last great work is the Steinhof church (1904–07), dedicated to Saint Leopold, in the grounds of a psychiatric hospital on the western hills of Vienna. It has a gilded dome visible from all over the city and a white, luminous interior designed on hygienic criteria: sloping floor to ease cleaning, holy-water fonts with running water, no decoration that gathers dust, and marble panels fixed as at the Postsparkasse. A building conceived for fragile people, without the edges that could hurt them. Here too, Wagner's rigour is a form of care.
A school that changes Vienna
Wagner leaves behind not only buildings but pupils. From his class at the Academy of Fine Arts come, among others, Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich, who in 1897 designs the Secession Building with its famous gilded laurel-leaf dome, and Jože Plečnik, who carries the same constructive rigour to Prague and Ljubljana. This group of pupils, the so-called Wagnerschule, does not copy the master's style: it inherits his method, the idea that every form must answer a real need before an aesthetic taste. It is through them, more than through the few buildings he signs himself, that Wagner's teaching reaches all the way to the Modern Movement.
In 1911, at seventy, Wagner publishes a final book, Die Großstadt (The Metropolis), applying the same principle to town planning: he proposes a model for the expansion of a Vienna able to grow endlessly in concentric sectors, each served by its own public transport network and laid out with blocks and buildings of uniform height, so that the city's growth would produce neither shapeless suburbs nor privileged quarters. The plan stays on paper — Vienna never grows in that form — but it anticipates by decades the questions twentieth-century town planning will grapple with: mobility as the modern city's basic infrastructure, not an afterthought.