Born July 13, 1841, in Vienna; died there on Apr. 11, 1918. Austrian architect.

Wagner was a representative of the Viennese art nouveau and a member of the Vienna Secession. He moved from the construction of buildings that were intricate in composition and replete with elaborate decor (the Steinhof Hospital in Vienna, 1904-07) to a search for rationality and simplicity. Wagner’s interior of a building for a post office and savings bank (Vienna, 1904-06) showed him to be a forerunner of functionalism—he used nondecorative, geometrically precise forms and bare metal structure.