Assigned Post 01
Essay: Otto Wagner
18.09.03
Otto Wagner (1841-1918) entered and exited his life with the pain of the deaths of loved ones, his father at age five and his love, Louise, in 1915. The strict household he grew up in as a boy in Vienna, Austria, encouraged his academics (his mother thought of him as becoming a lawyer) with private tutors until age nine, attendance at the Akademisches Gymnasium and boarding school. Attending and excelling at the Polytechnic Institute in Vienna provided an excuse from military service and a chance at even higher education at the Koenigliche Bauakademie in Berlin and the Academy of Fine Arts back in Vienna. Wagner's design for the casino in the Wiener Stadtpark gave him his first win in competition, but construction broke away from the plans.
The architect's first marriage to Josefine Domhart produced three children and a divorce. Soon afterward Wagner married Louise Stiffel. The remarriage along with the death of his beloved mother paralleled a change in Wagner's career with his quest to become internationally celebrated.
Wagner began his career designing apartment buildings, many of which he was ashamed of and removed all ties. Banks, personal homes, churches, dams, and overall municipal planning all constitute designs by Otto Wagner. Culminating his career in 1894 was the timely death and subsequent vacancy of the chair at the Vienna Academy of which Wagner was offered. Immediately in 1895, Wagner published his book Moderne Architektur, which served, as its subtitle states, as "a guidebook for his students to this field of art."
As always, success drags behind it conflict. Wagner's radical modernism ideals that he instituted and pushed for at the Academy dissatisfied his colleagues, sparking artistic battles which eventually would wound his own work, ending his job at the Academy and his job as a relevant architect; within a couple years Louise died and then he passed, estranged and alone.
