In einer Ruine

13. Juli 1841

Birth in Penzing

Born in Penzing — then a suburb of Vienna next to the imperial residence of Schönbrunn — to Rudolf Simeon Wagner, a prosperous notary of the Hungarian royal court chancellery, and Susanne von Helfersdorfer, née Hübner.

c. 1846

The death of his father

His father died of a lung disease when Otto was five. The family was left in want, yet his mother, Susanne, managed to give her son a good education.

from 1850

Schooling in Vienna and at Kremsmünster

From 1850 Wagner spends two years at the Vienna Academic Gymnasium, then attends the Benedictine gymnasium at Kremsmünster Abbey in Upper Austria.

1857–1860

The Vienna Polytechnic Institute

In 1857 Wagner enters the Vienna Polytechnic Institute, where he studies mathematics, physics, descriptive geometry, technology and drawing. Some accounts extend his studies to 1862, others have them ending in 1860, when he left for Berlin.

1860–1861

The Berlin Building Academy

On finishing his studies in Vienna Wagner goes to Berlin and studies at the Royal Building Academy under Carl Ferdinand Busse, a pupil of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the leader of the German school of neoclassical and neo-Gothic architecture.

1862

Joins Ludwig von Förster’s office

Wagner joins the architectural office of Ludwig von Förster, whose studio designed much of the new architecture along the Ringstraße. The first part of his career, lasting until about 1880, was spent on that boulevard; he described his own style of those years as “a sort of free Renaissance”.