His other key works include the Stoclet House in Brussels (1905-11) – now a Unesco World Heritage Site and one of Hoffmann’s numerous private residential projects – and the Purkersdorf sanatorium near Vienna (1905). In doing so, he adds, Hoffmann was able to give identity not only to progressive clients such as the Stoclet and Wittgenstein families, but to whole regimes in the form of political buildings, for example Austria’s pavilions for international expositions such as the Paris events of 1925 and the Venice Biennale of 1934. ‘He was not a radical modernist but a modernist who used historical forms to design something new,’ says Franz. With the artist Gustav Klimt, he was a driving force in the staging of the Kuntschau exhibition event in 1908, intended to showcase art, architecture, decorative arts and industrial arts. Inspired in part by the arts and crafts movement in the UK and the work of Ruskin and Morris, he was a pioneering co-founder of progressive art the Vienna Secession in 1897, followed by its offshoot the Wiener Werkstätte in 1903, a co-operative workshop dedicated to modern decorative arts. ‘He never stopped designing and having positive ideas of what design could give to mankind,’ he adds.īorn in what is now the Czech Republic, Hoffmann is best known as a leading instigator of Viennese modernism and was at the heart of the rich creative scene in the city in the early 20th century. Throughout, his focus was firmly on beauty, and in particular, says Franz, how beauty can ‘educate us and be a social factor’. Having studied architecture under Otto Wagner, he turned his hand to a Gesamtkunstwerk of interiors, furniture, decorative arts and fashion, introducing design into all aspects of everyday life and always acknowledging the role of the artisan in producing the work.
#Vienna secession interior josef hoffman full
Now, a comprehensive new exhibition at the MAK in Vienna, Josef Hoffmann – Progress Through Beauty, seeks to do full justice to Hoffmann’s long and influential career in a Covid-delayed celebration of his 150th birthday.Īccording to exhibition co-curator Rainald Franz, ‘no material was alien to him’. Yet after the Second World War, this most broad-ranging of architects and designers was largely forgotten until he was rediscovered in the latter decades of the last century.
In the 1930s, the architectural work of Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) was shown on a par with Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.
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