Josef Hoffmann
Leader of the Wiener Werkstätte.
Josef Hoffmann founded the Wiener Werkstätte and designed the Palais Stoclet in Brussels. He was one of the first to use strict grids in ornament.
Josef Hoffmann was born in 1870 in Pirnitz, now Brtnice in the Czech Republic, then part of Austria-Hungary. He studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Otto Wagner, who championed a modern architecture suited to new needs and materials. After his studies he received a travel scholarship to Italy, where he was fascinated by the simple, whitewashed rural houses.
In 1897 he was one of the founders of the Vienna Secession, the group of artists that broke with the conservative art establishment and gathered around Gustav Klimt. He became a professor at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna in 1899 and taught there for almost forty years. In 1903 he founded the Wiener Werkstätte together with Koloman Moser and the financier Fritz Waerndorfer, inspired by the workshops of the Arts and Crafts movement in England. The workshop produced furniture, silver, glass, jewellery and textiles of the highest quality.
Hoffmann's most important buildings are the Purkersdorf Sanatorium outside Vienna of 1904–05 and the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, built in 1905–11 for a Belgian banker. The palace is a total work of art in which every detail is designed, with a mosaic frieze by Klimt in the dining room. Since 2009 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but it is privately owned and not open to the public.
His style is geometric and severe, with squares, grids and contrasts of black and white. He was nicknamed “Square Hoffmann”. Later his forms became more classical and decorative. His designs include the Austrian pavilions at the 1925 Paris exhibition and at the 1934 Venice Biennale. The Wiener Werkstätte went bankrupt in 1932.
Hoffmann died in Vienna in 1956. His birthplace in Brtnice is now a museum. Many of his furniture designs and objects are still produced, and he is seen as an important link between Jugendstil and modernism, since his geometric visual language anticipated both Art Deco and functionalism.