Postsparkasse (Austrian Postal Savings Bank)

Landmark · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

A Vienna savings bank faced in two-centimetre marble nailed on with seventeen thousand heads left showing, its glass-roofed hall shaped like a nave.

The Postsparkasse shows about seventeen thousand nail heads on its front. The marble slabs behind them are only two centimetres thick, and every other large building going up nearby was dressed to look like solid stone. Otto Wagner made his wall admit that its stone was a thin skin, and the nails are the only ornament he allowed on it. The client was the Austrian postal savings bank, set up so that people with very small sums could save at a post office counter. For such savers, a front studded like an iron-bound money chest was the point. Wagner won the competition in 1903 and the bank opened in December 1906. Inside, the main hall is shaped like a church nave, running high down the middle and low along the sides, with a curved glass ceiling over its whole length and a glass floor underfoot. The bank sold the building in 2013 and moved out; universities and the Austrian Academy of Sciences work here now, so you walk into a room in use rather than a preserved bank.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come on a working day — The main hall is normally open on weekdays and you can walk straight in. At weekends you get the outside only, and an event can close it without notice.
Wait for low sun on the front — Each nail head is capped with polished aluminium, so in raking light the grid jumps out. Under flat cloud the front reads as one pale plane.
Look for the second glass roof — The curved glass ceiling over the hall is not the outer roof. A glazed roof sits above it, and Wagner invented a way of heating the gap between the two.
Remember it is somebody's office — The hall is open to walk through, but the floors above belong to the universities. Expect people crossing with coffee, and an artwork parked in the middle of the room.
Turn round and look across the square — The long building opposite was built as the imperial War Ministry. Wagner entered its competition two years after his bank opened, and lost to a heavy historical design.

Things to do

1
Read the whole front from the far side of the square
Cross Georg-Coch-Platz and look back from the far pavement. From there the individual nails disappear and the whole wall reads as one ruled surface, flat as a drawing. Then look at the top of the building. Aluminium figures over four metres tall stand on the attic, and from the doorway below you barely notice them.
2
Find every aluminium thing in the hall
Aluminium was new and expensive when this building went up, and Wagner used it wherever he could. Start with the tall free-standing blowers in the hall, which push warm air into the room. Then step back outside and look at the columns of the entrance porch, which are aluminium as well.