Post Office Savings Bank, Vienna

Built in two phases in 1903-6 the Vienna Post Office Savings Bank is Otto Wagner’s most technically advanced building and most mature work of architecture. It epitomizes the state of modern architecture in Vienna in the early years of this century with its extensive use of new materials, especially aluminium, its neat rational structure and well-lit spaces. The exterior is covered in light-coloured marble panels held in place by metal-studded bolts set out in a decorative, pattern-like Jugendstil framework. Internally, the barrel-vaulted banking hall proved remarkably successful, with its transparent roof, white walls and exposed steel structure. The building also incorporates a fresh air circulation system for both the offices and the public space.
Art historian Peter Haiko describes Post Office Savings Bank, Vienna:

The three-naved, basilical system of this space a high central nave is accompanied by lower side-naves, this system is in itself a characteristic of church-building in hisotrical architecture… as a modern aesthetic architect, Wagner tries to give his creation a rational base, in order to establish artistic form as the inevitable result of functional form. With the quotation from church architecture, he raises money trading from its profane level… He perfects money dealing with a quotation from a machine room, similarly inherent in the spatal solution, in the same way that labour is taylorised in the machine room.