Austria Banknotes 500 Schilling banknote 1985 Otto Wagner
National Bank of Austria - Österreichische Nationalbank
Obverse: Portrait of the Austrian architect Otto Wagner at right. Coat of arms of Austria at upper left.
Reverse: Main facade of the Österreichische Postsparkasse (P.S.K.) Austrian Postal Savings Bank building in Vienna, designed and built by the architect Otto Wagner. Coat of arms of Austria at upper left.
Dark brown, deep violet and orange-brown on multicolored underprint.
Watermark: Federal Arms and parallel vertical lines.
Size:- 144 x 72mm.
Signatures of Dr. Heinz Kienzl (as Generaldirektor), Dr. Stefan Koren (as Präsident) and Dr. Heinrich Treichel (as Generalrat). Two horizontal 6-digit serial numbers with single-letter prefix, single-letter suffix and digits of the same size on the reverse.
Introduced: 20. October 1986. Withdrawn: 28. February 2002.
Designed by Robert Kalina.
Austria banknotes - Austria paper money
1982-1988 Issue
20 Schilling 50 Schilling 100 Schilling
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Otto Wagner
Otto Koloman Wagner (13 July 1841 – 11 April 1918) was an Austrian architect and urban planner, known for his lasting impact on the appearance of his home town Vienna, to which he contributed many landmarks.
Wagner was born in Penzing, a district in Vienna. He was the son of Suzanne (née von Helffenstorffer-Hueber) and Rudolf Simeon Wagner, a notary to the Royal Hungarian Court. He studied in Berlin and Vienna. In 1864, he started designing his first buildings in the historicist style. In the mid- and late-1880s, like many of his contemporaries in Germany (such as Constantin Lipsius, Richard Streiter and Georg Heuser), Switzerland (Hans Auer and Alfred Friedrich Bluntschli) and France (Paul Sédille), Wagner became a proponent of Architectural Realism. It was a theoretical position that enabled him to mitigate the reliance on historical forms. In 1894, when he became Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, he was well advanced on his path toward a more radical opposition to the prevailing currents of historicist architecture.
By the mid-1890s, he had already designed several Jugendstil buildings. Wagner was very interested in urban planning — in 1890 he designed a new city plan for Vienna, but only his urban rail network, the Stadtbahn, was built. In 1896 he published a textbook entitled Modern Architecture in which he expressed his ideas about the role of the architect; it was based on the text of his 1894 inaugural lecture to the Academy. His style incorporated the use of new materials and new forms to reflect the fact that society itself was changing. In his textbook, he stated that "new human tasks and views called for a change or reconstitution of existing forms". In pursuit of this ideal, he designed and built structures that reflected their intended function, such as the austere Neustiftgasse apartment block in Vienna.
In 1897, he joined Gustav Klimt, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser shortly after they founded the "Vienna Secession" artistic group. From the ideas of this group he developed a style that included quasi-symbolic references to the new forms of modernity.
Wagner died in Vienna in 1918.
Austrian Postal Savings Bank building
The Austrian Postal Savings Bank building (German language: Österreichische Postsparkasse) is a famous modernist building in Vienna, designed and built by the architect Otto Wagner. The building is regarded as an important early work of modern architecture, representing Wagner's first move away from Art Nouveau and Neoclassicism. It was constructed between 1904 and 1906 using reinforced concrete.
It can be argued that the building is a continuation of traditional architecture with all its elements such as decoration, sculpture, an underlying order, primarily vertical composition, far different from the complete break with tradition that the congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne (CIAM) advocated in the 1920s.
The building houses the headquarters of the Österreichische Postsparkasse (P.S.K.) bank, formerly the k.k. Postsparcassen-Amt (Imperial-Royal Postal Savings Office). It is located at Georg-Coch-Platz 2, in the first district Innere Stadt, next to the Ringstraße boulevard.
Up to eight stories high, the building occupies an entire city block. The massively simplified facade of the bank clearly owes something to classicism. Wagner's key idea was to celebrate modern materials by developing new forms. The entire facade is covered with square marble plates. These are attached to the main brick structure with mortar and ornamented with iron bolts with aluminum caps, which themselves form a pattern. The building's harmonious synthesis between form and functionality was highly acclaimed by critics. The metal rivets do not obstruct the facade but resemble decorative elements. The use of marble also makes the maintenance and cleaning of the facade very easy and inexpensive, another important functional element in Wagner's design. The architect kept the design very minimalistic and simple; his aim was to convey the sense of a strong, impenetrable bank in which customers would know their money was safe.
Only at the upper part of the exterior, near the roof, did Wagner add more elaborate decorations, such as statues of female angels holding laurels in both hands. These were sculpted by frequent Wagner collaborator and fellow Secessionist Othmar Schimkowitz.