Otto Wagner 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.
One must view the urban architectural work of Otto Wagner within the context of the redevelopment of the Ringstrasse of Vienna.
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.
Camillo Sitte, the prominent urban planning theorist whose book “City Planning According to Artistic Principles” was published in 1889 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.
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.
Wagner’s 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 1930’s and advent of high-Modernism.
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