Professional Documents
Culture Documents
•Chapter 3: Composition
•Chapter 4: Construction
“The artist has been content to dissect the dead with a magnifying glass and lancet, instead of
listening to the pulse of those who are alive and relieving their pains.”
-Wagner
•He argues that the logical consequence of catering to these needs is that art, and artist,
are then forced to represent their epoch and to conform to modern appearances and
ideas, even to the point of staying in step with fashion.
•Architecture’s basis was no longer to be symbolic form, but construction and technology.
•Not only a building style; modernism affected all aspects of the aesthetics.
Composition
“The ‘modern eye’ has lost it’s sense for a small and intimate scale and become accustomed
to less varied images, to longer straight lines, to more expansive surfaces, and to plainer
silhouetting.”
-Mallgrave
•Emphasizes the human need for a visual resting point; otherwise a painful
uncertainty or aesthetic uneasiness occurs.
•The image to be perceived, whether from single or multiple viewing points, was
very important to Wagner.
•Viewing points: locations where the building can be seen most frequently, most
easily and most naturally
“The role of the architect is to is to acknowledge new technical means arising from needs and
interpret them in a way suited to modern sensibility.”
-Mallgrave
•Wagner felt there was a break with the past because of the changes in modern
construction methods; new technical and material means needed new formal
solutions
•Need, purpose, material and construction are conveyed as the primitive “germs” of
architectural production
•The introduction of IRON was the main reason for this change of vision
The Practice of Art
“There are two conditions demanded by modern man that can be considered to be criteria: the
greatest possible convenience and the greatest possible cleanliness.”
-Wagner
Wagner, Otto, 1841-1918. Modern architecture : a guidebook for his students to this field
of art / Otto Wagner ; introduction and translation by Harry Francis Mallgrave. Santa
Monica, Calif. : Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1988.