Railing

1897

A pamphlet against Wagner

Conservative Vienna answers his book with a pamphlet claiming that Wagner has turned from a fully mature architect into an experimenter in art, “a standard-bearer of fashion greedy for sensations”.

1897 or 1899

Joins the Vienna Secession

The Secession, founded in 1897, declared war on historicism and called for the abolition of the boundary between the fine and the applied arts. Some accounts say Wagner himself joined it only in 1899, others that he aligned himself with the movement as early as 1897.

1900

Wagner’s bathroom at the Paris World’s Fair

Wagner has the bathroom of his town apartment at 3 Köstlergasse — a marble panel carrying the shower head, a marble sink on nickel legs and a glass bathtub in a nickel frame — displayed at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. The apartment itself is decorated after Japanese floral prints and furnished with his own designs.

1900–1908

Four designs for the Vienna City Museum

Wagner produces four successive competition designs for a museum of the City of Vienna; the competitions are marked by scandals and an uncompromising clash of schools. The building is never built in his lifetime.