Vienna’s Wien valley around 1905: the regulated river vaulted over to carry the Naschmarkt, the Stadtbahn in its cutting with Wagner’s stations, Olbrich’s Secession at the head of the market, and Wagner’s Majolikahaus in a street of uniform apartment houses.
Art Nouveau was a style of single buildings and interiors more than of towns, but in Vienna it met a city-planning programme. Otto Wagner’s entry for the general regulation plan of 1893 carried the motto Artis sola domina necessitas (necessity is art’s only mistress). It proposed to regulate the Wien river, run the new city railway along it, vault the river over and make a great boulevard on top from the Ring to Schönbrunn. As artistic adviser to the Stadtbahn from 1894, Wagner designed every station, bridge and railing of the line; the river was regulated and, near the centre, vaulted; and from 1902 the Naschmarkt moved onto the vault. The boulevard beyond was never built.
Along the Linke Wienzeile Wagner built two houses of flats (1898–99) that show what his Moderne Architektur asked for: the rental block accepted for what it is (shops below, identical storeys above, a flat front and a broad protecting cornice), with ornament laid on the surface in durable materials, majolica tiles on one and gilded medallions on the other. At the head of the market stands the Secession, the exhibition house built in 1897–98 by his pupil Olbrich for the artists who had broken with the academy. Across Karlsplatz, the Stadtbahn pavilions show Wagner’s rule that construction comes first and becomes art-form: a green steel frame holding thin marble slabs.
The surrounding blocks are the uniform, cornice-lined apartment streets that Wagner’s Die Großstadt (1911) accepted as the proper fabric of the modern metropolis. Click a building to see its rule.