Joseph Maria Olbrich
Olbrich was a pupil of Otto Wagner and designed the Secession Building in Vienna. He then moved to Darmstadt and designed the artists’ colony on the Mathildenhöhe.
Joseph Maria Olbrich was born in 1867 in Troppau, now Opava in the Czech Republic, which then belonged to Austria-Hungary. He studied at the State Trade School in Vienna and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he won the Rome Prize and was able to travel in Italy and North Africa. On his return he joined Otto Wagner, who was designing Vienna’s new Stadtbahn, and Olbrich worked on stations and details. In 1897 he was one of the founders of the Vienna Secession, the group of artists who broke with official academic art to create a new art for a new age. The founders also included the painter Gustav Klimt and the architect Josef Hoffmann.
Olbrich designed the Secession’s exhibition building in Vienna, 1897–1898, with simple white volumes and a dome of gilded wrought-iron laurel leaves. The building became a manifesto for the new movement. In 1899 he was summoned to Darmstadt by Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse to lead an artists’ colony on the Mathildenhöhe hill. There he designed the studio building, the Ernst-Ludwig-Haus, the artists’ villas and, a few years later, the exhibition building and the tall Wedding Tower. The 1901 exhibition presented complete environments in which architecture, furniture and objects were designed together. Towards the end of his life he designed the Tietz department store in Düsseldorf. His style combines geometric forms with ornament and a rich use of materials.
Olbrich died in 1908, only forty years old. Despite his short career he became one of the most influential architects around 1900. The Secession Building and the Mathildenhöhe showed how artists and architects could collaborate on entire environments, an idea that lived on in the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus. The Mathildenhöhe was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021. In the Nordic countries the Vienna Secession and the Darmstadt colony influenced Art Nouveau and the applied arts of the period, and Swedish architects and designers followed the exhibitions in journals. The geometric, restrained side of his formal language also became a bridge between Art Nouveau and early modernism, as with his contemporary Josef Hoffmann in Vienna.