Wagner

IMG_6563, originally uploaded by bratislavadavis.

30-08-07

The final day in Vienna began with a de facto Otto Wagner tour on the premises of the Psychiatrisches Krankenhaus- an enormous mental hospital where the Kirche am Steinhof stands on the summit of a hill. The Kirche am Steinhof, constructed in 1907, was the last commissioned work in the distinguished career of Wagner. The church has a marble facade with screw-shaped pillars capped off by wreaths. On the façade of the church are bronze Jugendstil angels by Othman Schimkowitz. The stained blue glass windows of the church were painted by Kolo Moser. Unfortunately, the church can only be visited on Saturday afternoon, so I couldn't go inside.

The Wagner Villas are 3.5 kilometers from the Kirche am Stienhof. The villas are a set of two houses, but they were built nearly 20 years apart. The more colorful villa was completed in 1888 and was Wagner’s residence and incorporates both Ringstrasse and Jugendstil elements. The house seems more suitable to be built on the hills of Lombard in Italy as it integrates classical elements like ionic columns. The current resident of the villa, painter Ernst Fuchs added a fertility statue and lavish colors. The smaller villa, which is adjacent to the larger villa, is a steel and concrete house decorated in a geometrical style. Kolo Moser supplied the glass ornament. By the Hütteldorf train station is a contemporary bridge that was done by Wagner. I also got off to see the Kaiser Pavilion- a railway station completed in 1899 in an attempt to showcase his work to the Emperor Franz Joseph. The white wooden station is constructed in a cubic shape with green iron cladding the top of a copper dome. The trains go underneath the station.

I went to the Belvedere for the final time via tram D and paced around the three floors. The Adele Bloch-Bauer saga along with four other Klimt paintings is well-known, but it isn't the only noticeable work that the Belvedere had to return. In November of 2006, the Austrian Culture Ministry returned an Edvard Munch painting, "A Summer on the Beach" to Marina Mahler- the granddaughter of composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler and his wife Alma originally owned the painting, but it was sold to the Belvedere by her stepfather Carl Moll, a Nazi sympathizer, after Alma decided to lend the painting to the museum from 1937-1939 and after she fled Vienna with her Jewish husband, the novelist Franz Werfel. Alma unsuccessfully tried to get the painting returned until her death in 1964.

I bid a fond farewell to Vienna by going on the legendary Ferris wheel in the Prater that was immortalized in Carol Reed's film noir, “The Third Man”. The Ferris wheel was constructed by the British engineer Walter Bassett in 1897 to celebrate the golden jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph. The enormous wheel measures at 200 feet in height and moves at two and a half feet per second, and affords wonderful views of Vienna and the park. The wheel originally had 30 cabins, but there are about 15 today as the rest were destroyed by a fire during World War II.