Last summer, while visiting and researching Art Nouveau—or Jugendstil—architecture in Vienna, one of my visits was to the Otto Wagner Hospital in Vienna’s Penzing district, also known in popular speech as the Penzing Clinic.
This is a difficult article to write. It is about a grand plan by a master architect for a modern hospital with a humane plan and beautiful buildings and a masterpiece Art Nouveau church—but it is also the story of that hospital under Nazi rule when it became a center of torture, sadistic medical ‘research’ on adults and children, and the murder of 789 children condemned as ‘life unworthy of life.’
The hospital opened in 1907, roughly a contemporary of the San Pau Hospital in Barcelona, designed by Lluis Domenech i Montaner; both were designed as a series of separate pavilions, providing windows all around, allowing isolation of contagion, and providing fresh air and efficient central services for supply, food and more. Both were health-care extensions of the modernist movement reflected in their architecture.
Penzing originally had two main specialties: psychiatry and pulmonology, which in those days was heavily focused on tuberculosis. Otto Wagner, Vienna’s premier architect of the time, designed the plan and the church on the hill above it; the individual pavilions were the work of another architect, Carlo von Boog, whose restrained style reflected Wagner’s direction in that period as well.
A few of the buildings, such as this one housing an Art Nouveau theater and other recreational activities, have a more monumental architectural treatment, including elegant ironwork. The image below was our One-Clue Mystery, identified by George G.
There was even a small-scale railroad to move supplies, and especially meals, through the complex, with stations at the various buildings; the image below is of a meal-laden train leaving the kitchen station, whose station sign survives; the railroad was removed in the 1960s.
The site continues in use today, still home to psychiatry and pulmonology, but also to clinics for neurology, nursing care and advancing care, all under the general title of Sozialmedizinisches Zentrum Baumgartner Höhe—Otto Wagner Spital mit Pflegezentrum (Baumgartner Höhe Social Medicine Center—Otto Wagner Hospital and Care Center).
It is also home to two grim memorials and an exhibition and memorial, the Memorial to the History of Nazi Medicine in Vienna. The most visible memorial lies in front of the building housing the theater. Erected in 2003, it contains 789 light steles in memory of the 789 children tortured and murdered in the so-called Am Spiegelgrund clinic at the hospital. The idea of an individual marker for each victim came from a high school student as part of a competition for ideas for an appropriate memorial.
A second, and less visible memorial, is along a pathway; erected in 1988, its inscription is “To the Memory of the Victims of the National Socialist State in Psychiatry and as a Warning.”
At the top of the Steinhof hill above the hospital is Wagner’s Saint Leopold Church, commonly referred to a die Kirche am Steinhof, the Church on Steinhof. Built between 1903 and 1907, it is one of Wagner’s most spectacular works, and includes work by his frequent collaborators—glass and mosaics by Koloman Moser and sculpture by Othmar Schimkowitz. At the time of its opening, one critic complained that it resembled the tomb of an Indian Maharaja.
Because it was intended as part of a psychiatric hospital, Wagner made some unusual design decisions: very few sharp edges anywhere in the interior, a physical separation between the priests and patients, emergency exits to allow quick removal of a patient if needed, and pews of different sized allowing more space for patients who might become agitated in smaller spaces.
As impressive as it is, it was originally intended to have even more features, but funding ran out, and there were other objections as well. An elaborate Procession of the Cross was eliminated, as well as private chapels beneath the main building for Protestant and Jewish services for inmates.
Sadly, the church was not open on the day of my visit, and I wasn’t able to return on a day when it was; the images below are from the website of Wieninfo, the official city information and tourism office.
This is an excellent article. I especially appreciate the memorial to the Nazi victims: “To the Memory of the Victims of the National Socialist State in Psychiatry and as a Warning.” There are a lot of lessons in this piece.