Otto Wagner: Designing the City with Architecture

One must view the urban architectural work of Otto Wagner within the context of
the redevelopment of the Ringstrasse of Vienna. As in many European cities at the
time, the old fortifications around the medieval city center of Vienna were no longer
needed, and pressures for redevelopment were great. These old fortifications of the
feudal era were replaced with institutions of the new bourgeois power: University,
Parliament, Museums, etc.), as well as upscale blocks of housing

Ringstrasse Plan, Vienna, 1860

The new Ringstrasse development did not stitch the historic city center with the
surrounding suburbs as much as permanently separate them. Rather than a series
of urban spaces and connections it was essentially a linear void that
circumnavigated the historic city.
Critical of this development was Camillo Sitte, the prominent urban planning
theorist whose book City Planning According to Artistic Principles was published in

1889 and was exceedingly influential. His study of cities in this book emphasized
the importance of plazas and squares, composed and enclosed spaces that served
as outdoor rooms. In particular, he criticized the nineteenth-century trend of floating
massive civic and institutional buildings in the middle of vast plazas. To Sitte, the
plazas had to have an enclosed, human scale, and the important monuments
(typically churches in the past) were not free-standing, but emerged from the
surrounding fabric. Sitte advocated for an informal, picturesque composition, as well
as an approach that was artfully choreographed.

Camillo Sitte, Study of Medieval Plazas

Sitte even proposed changes to the Ringstrasse, attempting to arrest the linearity of
the new boulevard and to capture space along its length. Modernity with its
vastness of scale and its emphasis on speed was a tragic turn of events for Sitte,
one with profound emotional and cultural ramifications.

Camillo Sitte, Ringstrasse proposal, Vienna

Wagner, on the other hand, embraced the new modern city, and believed it should
represent movement and efficiency. His buildings were in deference to the streets.
They were not freestanding, or attached in picturesque ways as recommended by

Sitte, but inserted into the urban fabric. In this way, the buildings DEFLECTED and
FACILITATED movement.

Otto Wagner, War Ministry on the Ringstrasse, Vienna. His buildings were intended to
facilitate the movement of the street
Wagner vested monumentality not in buildings, but the street itself, which can be
seen as vast cuts through the urban fabric, most famously in his Groszstadt Plan.

Diagram of Wagner's Groszstadt

But before the Groszstadt plans, Wagner proved himself an incredibly adept sculptor
of urban blocks. For his Groszstadt, the urban blocks were units of aggregation, and
the open space was either the space of the street, or the residual space of blocks
removed, in both cases geometrically subservient to the infinite expansion of the
urban module.

Otto Wagner, Die Groszstadst, Plan (1911)

Open space created from the carving of the urban fabric. Even the landscape here is
architecturalized and provides geometric definition to the open space.
But when Wagner was working with actual urban conditions in Vienna, he showed a
very astute ability to navigate between the space of the city and the form of the
building. The block for Wagner was the connection between these two scales, and
provided urban synthesis. Here, for example, is his plan for the Technical Museum in
which the block and building almost converge. The building in plan is really an
ensemble of forms which both emphasize streets (by defining the block edge), but
also whose parts suggest hierarchy, access, urban scale, etc. The building in this
case is a sophisticated machine that resolves the complex geometries of the block
and surrounding urban conditions.

Technical Museum site plan: in which complex geometries of the the urban block are resolved
through a sophisticated architectural ensemble
Similarly, in Wagners plan for the Franz Joseph Municipal Museum, which was on a
prominent site adjacent to the Karlskirche of Fischer von Erlach, he created a
building that was not only itself a sophisticated urban proposition, but was part of a
larger urban ensemble that gave definition to the new park and maintained a
deferential respect to the Karlskirche.

Otto Wagner, Stadtmuseum site plan (1901): The building forms part of an urban ensemble
that gives definition to urban space and deference to Fischer von Erlach's Karlskirche

Otto Wagner, Stadtmuseum (1901): The building facade is continuous with the block, and
deflects to define the street. There are formal braks and emphases for both architectural and
urban affect (entrances, monumental symmety where appropriate. Note the 'corners' of the
building are designed not as part of an autonomous building with its own architectonic logic,
but in support of the large urban gestures the building makes.

Otto Wagner, Stadtsmuseum: perspective showing Wagners intention to

use his building as part of a larger urban ensemble that frames the
Karlskirche

Otto Wagner, Stadtsmuseum, aerial view: showing how Wagner's building is seen as an
integral urban element, one that helps complete and define the plan for the area around the
Karlskirche
Wagners buildings beautifully balanced between exquisitiely designed objects,
appropriate for the site and program, and sensitive pieces of larger urban
aggregations. They were both object and context, figure and ground. These
seemingly paradoxical qualities, perhaps even responsibilities, of buildings were
increasingly difficult to find after the 1930s and advent of high-Modernism