DURING A SWELTERING summer in Vienna last year, I found the city has a way of testing the limits of your sweet tooth. In the heat, I found all the sachertortes and strudel cloying. A less-foreseeable overload: the saccharine details that relentlessly embellish the city’s well-preserved churches. From the 17th century on, Vienna took an all-frills approach to architecture.
That is, until the turn of the 20th century, when Otto Wagner introduced a palate cleanser in the form of the Austrian Postal Savings Bank building, the last site on my architecture tour. The urban planner and architect, I’d been told by fan after fan, brought a lightness to construction by capitalizing on the transparency of glass and sheen of aluminum, then a newly formulated metal prized for its resistance to corrosion, its light weight and its gloss.
While his peers focused on reviving classical Greek and Renaissance styles, “Wagner almost single-handedly overthrew historicism and found a new way of building,” said MAK Austrian Museum of Applied Arts curator Sebastian Hackenschmidt, whose exhibition, “Post Otto Wagner: From the Postal Savings Bank to Post-Modernism,” opens May 30.
Given its much-heralded historical import, I felt obliged to visit the post office/bank, which looked nice enough in photos. But to be honest, every time a designer gushingly described Wagner as an influential force in his or her practice, I couldn’t quite fathom the awe.
So imagine my surprise when I stepped into the breath-taking lobby. No longer home to a functioning operation, the 6,000-square-foot main hall, though open to visitors, was peacefully absent of people. Diffused sunlight floating through Wagner’s barrel-vaulted glass ceiling cut through the layers of frippery fresh in my memory.
Ironically, the building, with its steel-ribbed ceiling soaring to what resembles a nave, feels much like a church, one in which orderly, rational grids serve as the decoration. The “nave” frames the one-time branch manager’s wooden vestibule in lieu of an altar. Tidy right angles abound, from the white metal struts that form a procession of columns, to the rectangular teller windows lining the room’s perimeter.
Wagner wasn’t a pure minimalist, however. “Wagner had said that for art’s sake, let’s stick with ornamentation,” Mr. Hackenschmidt noted, “but it needs to come from functionality”—a radical notion to a generation of architects who built first and tacked on decoration later. Wagner’s floor of glass bricks framed by stripes of linoleum allows light from the ceiling to illuminate the level below the atrium. The rhythmically spaced rivets hold aluminum panels. The 7½-foot-tall, robot-like cylinders that stand like sentinels, a 20th-century answer to saintly icons, provide heat.
“It’s industrial but hangs on to the tradition of ornament and craft,” Christian Swafford said of the building’s ethos. The co-founder (with Lauren Larson) of Manhattan design studio Material Lust recalled their own pilgrimage in 2014, when they spent two full hours in the postal savings bank in awe of the details. The lighting fixtures of their brand Orphan Work recall the grids of Wagner’s edifice, in a similar palette of black, white, glass and metal.
One hundred years after Wagner’s death, the influence of his post office remains: Aluminum, as seen in Piet Hein Eek’s sleek suspended lamp and Ramona Metal’s side table, is a household material. Gridded glass, akin to Wagner’s tile floors, gives Louise Roe’s votive holders additional play of light.
Back in Los Angeles, I’ve taken an approach to my own home that’s a bit Otto Wagner, a bit Marie Kondo—tossing not only the items that don’t bring me joy but the ones that don’t serve a function. The remaining essentials have style: Black-lacquer book shelves form an elegant grid. The arc of a glossy aluminum desk lamp adds grace. And white curtains, hung for privacy, diffuse the harsh sunlight.
ON THE GRID // Furnishings Inspired by Wagner’s P.O.
