Architecture Around the World.

Linke Wienzeile 38 and 40 Apartment Houses
Vienna, Austria

Built:
1898-1899
Architect:
Otto Wagner
Wagner himself lived in #38 for a few years.
Collaborators:
 Joseph María Olbrich, Kolo Moser, Othmar Schimkowitz
Style: Art Nouveau/Viennese Secession
Majolica/maiolica:
muh-JOL-i-kuh, muh-YOL-
Any earthenware having an opaque glaze of tin oxide.
A type of porous pottery glazed with bright metallic oxides that was originally imported into Italy via Majorca and was extensively made in Italy during the Renaissance.

TEXT Beneath Illustrations

Linke Wienzeile 40:  Majolica (Majolikahaus)


Architect Otto Wagner rebelled against the style of the Baroque Revival building to left of the Majolica: Linke Wienzeile 42  ...  Detail below:


Linke Wienzeile 42 detail - Baroque Revival




Building to the right is #38, also designed by Wagner  ...   "Majolica" was named after the flowered tile which covers the magnificent facade.

"The bottom two floors are treated as a base with ironwork that extends the influence of the shops up into the second floor with a narrow balcony. There is a gradation of detail and color from the bottom to the top with the green iron base, a gradual increase in complexity of the floral pattern from red to green toward to roof, finally capped with lion heads in relief and an elaborate overhanging eave. The junction between buildings on either side is managed by the use of a zone of balconies.  - Housing Prototypes.org  (online Jan. 2017)





Art Nouveau vibrant, glazed colors on the "majolica" tiles  ...  Overhanging eaves decorated with poppy flowers, green acanthus leaves  ...  Lion head




 Wagner moves away from relief ornaments and decorates the surface of the building with the weather-proof majolika tiles




Lion head




Sill decorated with foliage




Metal balustrade




Art Nouveau shaped supporting post




Note the similarity of color on the balcony and on the front entrance below   ...   The color serves as a unifying element.




Art Nouveau style doors





#38

Otto Wagner himself lived in the building for a few years.



Corner shaped as a quarter of a circle, a then ground-breaking solution.

"The two lower floors are used as a base, with a wrought iron comprising the areas devoted to stores and extending to the upper two floors surrounded externally with a narrow balcony. The commercial ground floor, large glass part, lightens the construction..." -  en.wikiarquitectura (online Jan. 2017)




The floors of the two buildings are misaligned but are joined by a "balcony column"




Note dual finial female figures at top of building (detail below:)












Gilded  stucco  medallions  done by Koloman Moser, another great Austrian Art Nouveau artist and painter  






Garlands




Baroque Revival building across the street








Otto Wagner (1841 to 1918) was one of the founding members of the revolutionary artists’ association Vienna Secession. The trained architect, visual artist and brick layer shaped Vienna with a series of constructions. The best are the Austrian Postal Savings Bank, villas, railway stations, and residential buildings to the most beautiful Art Nouveau were on the Danube.

Otto Wagner:  Austrian architect, furniture designer, interior decorator, artist and rebel Otto Wagner holds the key to Viennese Art Nouveau architecture. He essentially brought the city into the 20th century. Wagner’s modernist and art nouveau pieces celebrate the beauty of simplicity. (Even the most functional items like nails look decorative.)
-  "Otto Wagner Vienna: Modernism and Art Nouveau." Vienna Unwrapped (online Jan. 2017)



The apartment houses that line the Wienzeile are an attractive, if rather ordinary, lot, but two stand out: Linke Wienzeile 38 and 40 —the latter better known as the "Majolica House"—designed (1898–99) by the grand old man of Viennese fin-de-siècle architecture, Otto Wagner. A good example of what Wagner was rebelling against can be seen next door, at Linke Wienzeile 42, where decorative enthusiasm has blossomed into baroque-revival hysteria.

Wagner banished classical decoration
and introduced a new architectural simplicity, with flat exterior walls and plain, regular window treatments meant to reflect the orderly layout of the apartments behind them. There the simplicity ended.

For exterior decoration, he turned to his younger Secessionist cohorts Joseph Olbrich and Koloman Moser, who designed the ornate Jugendstil patterns of red-majolica-tile roses (No. 40) and gold stucco medallions (No. 38) that gloriously brighten the facades of the adjacent house—so much so that their baroque-period neighbor is ignored. The houses are privately owned.
- Fodor's Travel: Otto Wagner Houses (online Jan. 2017)



Wagner's reputation was firmly established in Vienna on the basis of his work on the Stadbahn and on the bridges and locks along the Danube Canal. Wagner shocked the Vienna community when, in 1899, he left the Künsterhaus which had recommended him for these commissions and joined the Secessionists. The two apartment houses on Linke Wienzeile, no. 38 and 40, built near the center of Vienna, date from this period. At the time they were felt to be "hideous beyond measure."

These two buildings, side-by-side and of constant height and modulation, together form an unparalleled decorated Secessionist wall of dwellings and shops.

Majolica

Number 40 on the left, the so-called Majolica, was named after the flowered tile which covers the magnificent facade.

The bottom two floors are treated as a base with ironwork that extends the influence of the shops up into the second floor with a narrow balcony. There is a gradation of detail and color from the bottom to the top with the green iron base, a gradual increase in complexity of the floral pattern from red to green toward to roof, finally capped with lion heads in relief and an elaborate overhanging eave. The junction between buildings on either side is managed by the use of a zone of balconies.
- Housing Prototypes.org  (online Jan. 2017)




Excerpts
Apartment Building in Linke Wienzeile and Köstlergasse 1
en.wikiarquitectura (online Jan. 2017)


Otto Wagner was the owner of the buildings in the Linke Wienzeile 38-40 so he could develop his ideas to the extreme. These houses belonging to the mature stage of the architect shows their final break with historicism characteristic of his early work and adherence to Viennese Secessionist movement

Obviously buildings Wienzeile nº38-40 Linka, despite their different decor, is intended to be a set using effectively the situation in the corner of the street. The floors of the two buildings are misaligned but are joined by a column regarding rearmost balcony facades.

These two buildings next to each other and high and constant modulation are unparalleled homes and businesses decorated with Art Nouveau style on Linke Wienzeile wall.

#40 Majolika House

The facade cladding is completely made ornamental majolica tiles that create colorful floral swirls of pink. In Majolikahaus, Wagner applied his ideas of functionality: the beauty in this case is combined with functional in a facade, because the materials used, it is easy to clean and resistant to decay. This facade is framed by two columns of balconies lagging with respect to it and which on one side is used to connect the two adjacent buildings which plants are misaligned thereby integrated in one set.

There is a gradation of detail and color from the bottom to the top of the facade whose base is the green-painted iron balcony, a gradual increase in the complexity of combining floral pink and green to the ceiling, to be topped by the heads of lions in relief framed windows regular rhythm and elaborate cantilevered eaves.

The reasons for the wrought iron entrance extends into the bars of the balcony of the first and second floor, and the balconies of the apartments at the two lateral axes, all painted green and continuing with the series of reasons repeated.

#38

Although this facade also highly corresponds to the Secessionist style, white color combined with its gilded stucco ornaments and the particular form taken by the decor, giving it a more classic look, with garlands and rosettes that are repeated not only in the front, also in the metal door of the entrance and inside corridor.

The two lower floors are used as a base, with a wrought iron comprising the areas devoted to stores and extending to the upper two floors surrounded externally with a narrow balcony. The commercial ground floor, large glass part, lightens the construction emphasizing the intervention of the architect, like the horns projecting upward and join the balconies of the first and second floor, or given to the corner solution with its roundness and three windows per floor, giving it the appearance of a true front and compensating the low relief given access. Crowning this chamfer you put two of the bronze figures "calls women."




Photos and their arrangement © 2008 Chuck LaChiusa
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