Josef Hoffmann

Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), Austrian architect and decorator,

was a pioneer of European modernism and founder of the Wiener
Werksttte (Viennese Workshop).
Josef Franz Maria Hoffmann was born in Pirnitz (Brtnice), then in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, on December 15, 1870. He studied architecture at
the trade school in Brnn. Following his graduation in 1891 he went to
Wrzburg for a year of practical experience and then entered the special
architectural school of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he studied
until 1895, first under Carl von Hasenauer and then under Otto Wagner. Upon
graduation he won the Rome Prize. Otto Wagner then employed him as a
draftsman in his office for several years.
During his studies and early professional years Hoffmann assimilated
the historicist architectural traditions of Vienna, as exemplified in the work of
Hasenauer and Wagner (among others); Wagner's functionalistic theories; the
stylistic experimentations of the European Art Nouveau; and the teachings of the English arts and crafts movement.
Hoffmann's earliest independent works, such as the rooms of the second, third, and fourth exhibitions at the Vienna
Secession that he designed in 1899 and the remodelling of the store Am Hof 3 in Vienna the same year, showed
clearly the influence of Art Nouveau and of the English arts and crafts.
In 1899 Hoffmann became professor at the Kunstgewer-beschule (School of Applied Arts) in Vienna. His
works of the following year, such as the rooms of the Kunstgewer-beschule at the Paris Exhibition, already showed a
drastic change in his style from the flowing curvatures of the earlier works to a rectilinear simplicity of form and the
tendency of superimposing rectangular elements and motifs; both of these would become Hoffmann's stylistic
hallmarks. For this change Hoffmann was particularly indebted to the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the
Scottish master of Art Nouveau, who was highly regarded in Vienna.
Hoffmann's first important architectural commission was for a group of villas in the Hohe Warte near
Vienna. These were designed in careful relation to each other so as to form a total composition. Moreover, their
interior arrangement was expressed on the exterior and great emphasis was placed on color and texture. Yet one
notices in them an increased simplicity of form; this became even more prominent in the works that Hoffmann
exhibited at the 1902 Kunstausstellung in Dsseldorf.
Together with Kolo Moser, Hoffmann founded in 1903 the Wiener Werksttte for the production of
furniture and objects of the applied arts. In the same year he received the commission for the Purkersdorf
Sanatorium, which was built in 1903 and 1904. This was a work of astonishing modernity and could be easily
antedated by 25 years. It had plain white walls and ample, regularly placed windows almost devoid of surrounding
frames. There were no cornices, and the roofs were completely flat. Hoffmann's opus magnum, the Palais Stoclet in
Brussels, was designed in 1905 and built between 1905 and 1911. It was a large and luxurious mansion,
asymmetrically composed and dominated by the stair-tower. The external walls were covered by a thin veneer of
marble plaques contained within a decorative edging of gilded metal that defined the wall planes. Both the exterior
and the lavishly appointed interior were characterized by a charm and playfulness that were Austrian in character;
clearly Hoffmann's, however, was the pervasive effect of a relentless geometry of form inside and out. Both the
Purkersdorf Sanatorium and the Palais Stoclet were entirely furnished by the Wiener Werksttte.
Hoffmann did not develop his style further after the Palais Stoclet. Instead, he resorted to the Neoclassicism
that became predominant all over Europe and in England after 1905. A notable work of the time was the Ast House
in the Hohe Warte near Vienna, built in 1909-1911. This was also quite large and luxurious, although more massive
and tectonic than the Palais Stoclet. The classicizing tendency in Hoffmann's work became more explicit in two later
works, the Skyra-Primavesi House in the Hietzing suburb of Vienna and the Austrian Pavilion at the Cologne
exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund of 1914. In both Hoffmann articulated the exterior with broad, fluted
pilasters; yet these elements of classical inspiration were used in a mannerist way that had little to do with their
original structural and formal properties. For example, in the Austrian Pavilion the massive pilasters appeared to be
supporting a cornice that was nothing more than a thin molding. Hoffmann's last great villa, the Knips House in
Vienna of 1924-1925, was a compact block that emulated deliberately the Biedermeier architecture of its
surroundings. Hoffmann became city architect of Vienna in 1920. The low-cost housing blocks that he designed in
the mid-1920s in Vienna, such as the Klosehof and the Winarskyhof, retained in their simplicity and cleanliness of
composition a good deal of the purist quality of his sanatorium at Purkersdorf. Hoffmann died in Vienna on May 7,
1956.
The Wiener Werksttte that Hoffmann founded sought a new relation between formal beauty and
functionalism and brought about a revival of the applied arts. The furniture and other objects that he designed for
production at the Wiener Werksttte exercised a great influence on the European taste for several decades. In their
simplicity and formal expediency these prepared the way for the plainer surface articulation and purity of
modernism.