Josef Hoffmann
Josef Hoffmann founded the Wiener Werkstätte and designed the Stoclet Palace in Brussels and the Purkersdorf Sanatorium. His austere, geometric style of squares and straight lines led from Art Nouveau towards modernism.
Josef Hoffmann was born in 1870 in Pirnitz in Moravia, today Brtnice in the Czech Republic. He studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under Otto Wagner and won a travelling scholarship to Italy. In 1897 he was one of the founders of the Vienna Secession, together with Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and Joseph Maria Olbrich among others. He became a professor at the Vienna School of Applied Arts in 1899 and taught there for almost forty years.
In 1903 Hoffmann, together with Koloman Moser and the industrialist Fritz Waerndorfer, founded the Wiener Werkstätte, a workshop for the applied arts that designed furniture, silver, glass, textiles and jewellery. He built the sanatorium at Purkersdorf, with smooth white façades and straight lines, and the Stoclet Palace in Brussels, a total work of art with Klimt’s mosaic frieze. He designed villas in Vienna, among them in the Hohe Warte district, and Austria’s pavilions at several international exhibitions. His formal language was based on squares, grids and black-and-white contrasts.
The Wiener Werkstätte closed in 1932, and Hoffmann received fewer commissions after the 1930s. He died in Vienna in 1956. His austere geometry has been seen as a bridge between Art Nouveau and modernism, and his furniture and objects are still produced. He had great influence on design and the applied arts in Europe, including in the Nordic countries, where the idea of uniting artist and craftsman lived on.