Wien Museum, 14 April – 18 September 2016

Otto Wagner’s master class at the Academy of Fine Arts was the most important laboratory of architectural modernism in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Wagner and his students created visionary designs for an architecture of the future, founding an aesthetic that was rigourously functional and firmly grounded in the materials of construction.

Initially, the Wagner School owed its international reputation not to its buildings, but to refined and well-articulated drawings. Journals furnished an ideal stage for this “modernism on the drafting board,” and the group made deft use of these periodicals to transmit their impressive panorama of possibilities for modernist building.

The exhibition showcases the drawings of Rudolf Weiss (1890-1980), one of the last students of Otto Wagner. The Wien Museum acquired these works in 2014 as a gift from its Friends Association. Weiss’s drawings are valuable documents that represent a twentieth-century architecture resolutely conceived and communicated as media.