A new material calls for new forms: iron should be used in slender members that show its strength in tension and bending, not cast in imitation of stone columns and vaults.
Necessity is art’s only mistress
Take the forms of a new architecture from modern life, modern materials and modern construction, not from past styles: what is not practical cannot be beautiful, and a building should show plainly what it is for.
Wagner put Artis sola domina necessitas on his plan for Vienna in 1893 and built his teaching on it. Every style of the past, he argued, grew from the needs and means of its time, so the present must find its own. For the apartment house that meant accepting its nature (a stack of equal floors over shops) and giving it a flat front, a strong cornice and ornament laid on the surface in durable materials, as on the majolica tiles of the house at Linke Wienzeile 40.
The Vienna Secession, founded in 1897 by his pupils and friends, took the same stand; its building by Olbrich carries the motto “To the age its art, to art its freedom”.
Related rules
Omit applied ornament from buildings and everyday objects: it wastes work, money and material, dates quickly, and adds nothing that fine material and exact workmanship cannot give.
Begin every design from its construction; the architect’s task is to turn the construction into art-form, never to hide it behind forms borrowed from another material.
Accept that the modern city is made of rental apartment blocks of equal height and similar floors; line its streets with them in long uniform rows, and give it variety and dignity through monuments, squares and parks rather than through fancy dress on each house.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Necessity is art’s only mistress”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/wagner-necessity. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.