JOSEF HOFFMANN

Early years

Josef Hoffmann’s long life spanned more than eight decades of which he spent at least six active as an artist. He lived and worked in five political systems and influenced hundreds of designers to the present day while always remaining true to his high creative standards.

But who was this well-dressed man with a mustache and pince-nez?

Josef Hoffmann was an architect and “all-round designer”—a term he really lived up to. He was an innovator, conscious of tradition, and, as we would maybe call him nowadays, an entrepreneur of his times.

Born as a citizen of the monarchy into a relatively stable “world of yesterday,” Hoffmann spent his youth in Brtnice in today’s Czech Republic. His house of birth, which he later redesigned as a summer residence, has been preserved until today and can be visited as a museum. 

At the age of almost ten, his path led him to secondary school in Brno. Hoffmann was traumatized by the authoritarian school system but his interest in art and architecture soon awoke. At the age of 19, after family disputes, he managed to change to the architecture department at the State Technical School where he also passed his school leaving examination.

After one year as an architecture intern in Würzburg, he began his studies at the age of 22 at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. This was the starting point of his new life. Everything would change in this metropolis of the empire—Vienna was a vibrant city that was beginning to replace its weir system and city wall by educational institutions, museums, theaters, and administrative buildings.

Hoffmann’s studies were classically aligned with the high level of excellence required for the Ringstaße project—entirely in the sense of revisiting and implementing historical styles. His professor, Carl Freiherr von Hasenauer, was one of the most important and busiest architects of this boulevard. Two years into Hoffmann’s studies, Hasenauer died and Otto Wagner took over his position.

Professor Otto Wagner

became Hoffmann’s intellectual mentor, he was the great innovator and pioneer in Vienna. With projects like the Stadtbahn, the regulation of the Vienna River, apartment buildings, and, of course, the famous Postal Savings Bank, he rightfully earned the title “Father of Modernity.”

Besides Hoffmann, Wagner’s students and admirers included Adolf Loos, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Max Fabiani, and Rudolph M. Schindler.

Wagner prioritized function, design was to emerge from it. This applied to architecture as well as every object designed by him—following the principle “FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION.”

This principle would also have a lasting impact on Hoffmann, and in many of his objects we can find Wagner’s influence: in design work oriented towards reduction, flat décors, as well as a high level of functionality and simplicity.

The Stoclet family’s financial means enabled Hoffmann to plan more elaborately, luxuriously, and exquisitely than elsewhere. Without an agreement by Fritz Waerndorfer to execute construction and furnishing for a lump sum of 500,000 Kronen, not only Hoffmann but the entire Wiener Werkstätte would have got into less difficulties. The costs of the Stoclet House project ended up being three times higher than estimated.

1905–1911, numerous artists of the WW, such as Carl Otto Czeschka, Richard Luksch, and Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel, as well as Gustav Klimt with his design for the mosaic in the dining room, worked on this “first (and last) modern bourgeois palace,” as phrased by Matthias Boeckl. Here, the unity of the arts—the aim at the time—was given its harmonic manifestation. The garden, the pergola, the porch, as well as the entire outer area were integrated into the Gesamtkunstwerk.