Otto Wagner's Karlsplatz Pavilions
Why is it significant?
In front of you stand two small buildings facing each other like twins: pale green iron frames, thin white marble slabs, and over every doorway a golden sunflower spreading its petals across the roof line. They look like jewellery boxes. In fact they were railway stations.
Key Facts
| Place | Otto Wagner's Karlsplatz Pavilions |
|---|---|
| Address | Karlsplatz, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.20030, 16.37030 |
| Part of Walk | Gold, Rebels and The Kiss: Vienna from the Secession to the Belvedere |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you stand two small buildings facing each other like twins: pale green iron frames, thin white marble slabs, and over every doorway a golden sunflower spreading its petals across the roof line. They look like jewellery boxes. In fact they were railway stations.
At the end of the nineteenth century Vienna built the Stadtbahn, a city railway that ran around the centre and along the river Wien, and the man in charge of its architecture was Otto Wagner. He designed dozens of stations, bridges and viaducts, and these two pavilions, opened in 1899, are the most famous of all. One was the entrance for trains in one direction, the other for the opposite one. In those days, by the way, the trains here were pulled by steam engines.
Look at how they are made. Wagner did not carve the walls out of stone like a palace. He built a steel skeleton and hung the marble on it in thin plates, like a coat, and he left the iron visible and painted it. His motto was that something impractical cannot be beautiful. Yet he could not resist the gold: the sunflowers, the delicate lines around the doors... That same year, 1899, the sixty-year-old professor joined the Secession you have just seen, the oldest of the rebels by far.
These pavilions very nearly vanished. When Vienna built its modern U-Bahn in the 1970s, Karlsplatz became a vast construction pit, and the old station was in the way. After public protest the pavilions were taken apart piece by piece and put back together on top of the new station. Today one of them is a small museum about Otto Wagner run by the Wien Museum, and the other has become a café.
Stand between the two for a moment. Beneath your feet three underground lines now cross, thousands of people pass every hour, and almost nobody looks up at the sunflowers. Now walk east across the square, past the grand palazzo with the arched windows that marks the corner, to the building the rebels walked out of.