Otto Wagner Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity

Description

Отто Коломан Вагнер (13 июля 1841 — 11 апреля 1918) — австрийский архитектор, мастер стиля модерн, лидер его австрийской ветви — сецессиона.A traditionalist designer with imperial ambitions or an avant-garde general leading the charge of a modernist assault, a Secessionist architect with a penchant for iconography or a materialist proponent of realist values—Otto Wagner can be portrayed in many ways. As the ten essays in this volume argue, however, a more complete portrait is achieved when variant and seemingly contradictory aspects of his rich architectural and literary oeuvre are allowed to coexist and find their own historical balance. This book is focused less on the visually seductive aspects of Wagner’s creations than on the social, intellectual, and artistic framework within which the architect brought his works to fruition. The result is a broad but at the same time concentrated exploration of the parameters of Wagner’s tectonic expression—a canvas of a period in which the sensualist aesthetic tendencies of the late nineteenth century merged with the more sachliche vision of twentieth-century art.