Death Anniversary: Otto Wagner — April 11, 1918

Otto Wagner died in Vienna on 11 April 1918, a few months before the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire whose modern capital he had imagined. Many of his most ambitious projects stayed on paper, but the buildings he did complete — stations, churches, public offices — had already changed the idea of the city. His school trained a generation of architects, from Olbrich to Hoffmann. The anniversary marks his lesson: beauty comes out of function and out of the materials of one’s own time.