Brunnenhaus

Brunnenhaus stands in the garden of the Ernst Fuchs Museum in Vienna, between the first and second Otto Wagner villas. Ernst Fuchs created the fountain house between 1992 and 1996 in a Byzantine style. The former Otto Wagner Villa I began as a summer residence, built between 1886 and 1888. Its park now brings architecture, sculpture and landscape together around several works by Fuchs.

Ceramic reliefs, fired three times, cover the structure alongside hand-crafted bronze capitals. A bronze Saint Christopher relief marks the front of the Nymphäum Omega. The Moses Fountain faces it, its colourful Tiffany glass mosaic catching sunlight across the garden. Inside, the Madonnenfenster shows the Madonna, while gilded angels belong to the Apokalypsebrunnen.

Natural springs run through the grounds, beneath the presence of Vienna’s so-called thousand-year-old oak. The setting connects religious imagery, magical realism and carefully worked materials in one compact composition. Fuchs restored the villa in the 1970s after it had fallen into disrepair following the war. Here, a fountain house becomes a meeting point for Otto Wagner’s architecture, Fuchs’s vision and the living park.