Otto Wagner

This is an image that puts a bookend at the beginning of the trip for me. These are the Wagner Apartments and we saw them at the end of our first full day in Vienna. They were designed by Otto Wagner, who also designed the Karlsplatz Pavilions, where our group had stopped for a photo at the start of the day. From there, we went on to visit the Historial Museum of Vienna, the Freud Museum and the Hofburg Palace Imperial Apartments, Sisi Museum and Treasury.

It was a full day, so we opted to stay close to home for dinner and wandered past the Wagner apartments along our way ("home" was the Hotel Ananas, which is right next to the Pilgramgasse U-Bahn stop). These buildings are just outside the Kettenbrückengasse station, near the Secession Building and Naschmarkt, which we would be visiting later in the trip. But more importantly, Wagner was part of the Secession artists group, which would provide a thread that ran through many of the places we got to visit in Vienna (I do love the Art Nouveau!).

This particular image kept repeating for me throughout the trip, as we were to pass it again and again when we visited sites nearby. It was hard to photograph -- getting the whole thing in the frame would have been difficult because it was all so close to the other buildings in the area, and that would have caused an unacceptable loss of detail anyway -- and I never did catch it in full sun. I looked on the web to see what other photographers did with the challenge, and they all seemed to struggle along with me.