Otto Wagner was born in the Penzing district of Vienna. He studied in Berlin and Vienna. After work as brick layer he started as architect. His first buildings were in the historism style. In the late 1880s he became a proponent of the realism style. In 1890 he designed a city plan for Vienna but only the railway netwerk Wiener Stadtbahn was built. In 1894 he became Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.In 1896 he published a textbook entitled Modern Architecture in which he wrote down his ideas about the role of the architect, it based on his first lecture in the Academy. He called for an architecture based on modern materials and modern construction methods. In 1897, he joined Gustav Klimt, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser shortly after they founded the "Vienna Secession" artistic group. He died in 1918 in Vienna.