Rebel Modernists: Viennese Architecture since Otto Wagner

Set within the fascinating cultural and political world of Vienna from the fin-de siecle to the present day, this book provides an insightful analysis of the city's extraordinarily rich architectural tradition. Since 1900, Vienna has produced many great architects and their work includes some of the finest masterpieces of the twentieth century such as Otto Wagner’s Stadtbahn stations, his Postsparkasse and his Majolica House, Adolf Loos’s American Bar and Goldman & Salastch, the Secession building by Joseph Maria Olbrich, and Josef Hoffmann’s Palais Stoclet, not to mention Ludwig Wittgenstein’s House for his sister. Beginning with Wagner’s polemical manifesto, Moderne Architektur, it stresses the importance of the fraught and highly polarized cultural politics that engulfed Vienna for most of the twentieth century and ultimately produced much of what is modern in every field of culture and science.