Martin Wagner (1885–1957) was a German architect, city planner, and author, best known as the driving force behind the construction of modernist housing projects in interwar Berlin.
Tall, angular, loyally Socialist, and uncompromising in his opinions, Wagner was educated at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin) and worked as a draftsman in the office of planner Hermann Muthesius, before being appointed the City Building Commissioner for Schöneberg in 1918 (now an inner-city area of Berlin).
In 1924, he founded the building society GEHAG [de], which was responsible for seventy percent of Berlin's housing built from 1924 through 1933, amounting to many thousands of residential units.
As the Nazis came to power in the early 1930s, Wagner fell under increasing pressure and suspicion as a committed Social Democrat and longtime member of the SPD.
In 1938, Wagner took a position teaching city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, his immigration to the United States assisted by his colleague Walter Gropius.