Stoclet Palace
The banker Adolphe Stoclet gave Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte a free hand and an unlimited budget. The house is a white box of marble slabs with dark bronze edgings, and inside Gustav Klimt made a frieze in gold and mosaic. It is a total work of art from roof to cutlery.
Adolphe Stoclet, a Belgian banker and art collector, lived for a time in Vienna and got to know the artists of the Wiener Werkstätte. In 1905 he commissioned Josef Hoffmann to build his home in Brussels. The house was completed in 1911. Hoffmann and his colleagues designed not only the house but also the garden, the furniture, carpets, lamps and cutlery. Gustav Klimt made the mosaic frieze in the dining room, with the Tree of Life and figures known as Expectation and Fulfilment.
The house consists of box-like volumes shifted against each other, and it has a tall stair tower with four figures and a dome of flowers on top. The façades are clad in thin slabs of white Norwegian marble, framed by bronze mouldings. This makes the house look light, almost as if it were made of paper. Inside, the materials are luxurious: marble, precious woods, onyx and mosaic. Everything is subordinated to a geometric formal language of squares and straight lines, which distinguishes Vienna from the sinuous forms of Art Nouveau in Brussels.
The house was lived in by the Stoclet family into the 21st century and is not open to the public. It became a World Heritage Site in 2009. The Stoclet Palace is regarded as the masterpiece of the Wiener Werkstätte and one of the most important houses between Art Nouveau and modernism. It showed how architecture, applied art and fine art could merge in a Gesamtkunstwerk.