Fotoeins Fotografie

location bifurcation, place vs. home

25T60 Otto Wagner’s magnificent Church at Steinhof

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E59, V07.

The city bus drops off passengers in front of a building with the words “Otto Wagner Spital”, a legacy of early 20th-century construction for a hospital complex. Many of the former hospital buildings are now art-, music-, and cultural-spaces.

Keeping faith with the accuracy of signs, it’s a short but steep walk on graded gravel paths until a large dome pokes out into the open behind the canopy of trees. On a sunny day, the dome looks like a bright yellow lemon to the city below.

Completed in 1907 to serve patients in the surrounding hospital complex, the Church of St. Leopold at Steinhof by Otto Wagner is one of Vienna’s most important buildings, one of the finest examples of turn-of-the-century Vienna Modernism, and considered to be Europe’s 1st modernist church. Today, the Wien Museum maintains and opens the still-functional church for the public.

Otto Wagner’s architectural and design legacy from the early 20th-century is predominantly secular, remaining visible throughout the city today.

Seated near the top of Lemoniberg hill (345m), the church’s yellow dome can be seen for miles around.
Public entrance.
Interior space; the entire floor is slightly tilted from the entrance towards the chancel in front.
Eyeballs converge onto the high altar. The length of the pews are deliberately short.
The high altar, behind which is a 1913 mural by Leopold Forstner on the wall.
Free-standing high altar made with white marble; design by Otto Wagner.
Angels surround the canopy for the altar; at the top is a circular opening with a view maintained upwards.
0.5x image scaling. The large stained-glass windows on each side are by Koloman Moser. Sharp readers will have noticed a few people seated in the pews.

The first Sunday of the month means that all Wien Museum properties are free admission for the day. I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 6 July 2025. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.

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