A traditionalist designer with imperial ambitions or an avant-garde general leading the modernist charge, a Secessionist architect with a penchant for symbolic effects, or a materialist proponent of realist values - Otto Wagner can be portrayed in many ways. As the ten essays in this volume argue, however, a more complete portrait is achieved when seemingly contradictory aspects of his rich architectural and literary oeuvre are allowed to find their own historical balance. These essays focus less on the visually seductive aspects of Wagner's creations than on the social, intellectual and artistic framework within which the architect brought his works to fruition. The result is a broad but concentrated exploration of the parameters of Wagner's expression - a canvas of a period in which the sensualist aesthetic tendencies of the late 19th century merged with the more material vision of 20th-century art.