Josef Hoffmann

Biography

The Stoclet Palace in Brussels took six years to build, from 1905 to 1911, and all that time Josef Hoffmann supervised the walls, the door handles, the bathroom, the kitchen furniture and a garden clipped into geometric shapes. The white cubic volumes are faced in Norwegian marble, and the edges of the windows and corners are trimmed with metal. In the dining room Gustav Klimt laid out a mosaic frieze. For the client, Adolphe Stoclet, heir to a Belgian banking family, the architect designed almost everything, down to the tableware.

It all began in Moravia.

Hoffmann was born on 15 December 1870 in Brtnice (then Pirnitz), the son of a co-owner of a textile factory; his father was also the town’s mayor. His father saw him as a lawyer or civil servant and sent him to a prestigious school, but it poisoned his youth, as Hoffmann himself recalled. In 1887 he transferred to the Higher School of Arts and Crafts in Brno, and in 1891 he received his school-leaving certificate. By some accounts he briefly worked for a military building office in Würzburg; this is hard to confirm. In 1892 he entered the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, studying under Karl von Hasenauer and Otto Wagner. There he became close to Joseph Maria Olbrich, Koloman Moser and Carl Otto Czeschka; in 1895 they formed a circle later regarded as a forerunner of the Secession. His graduation project, done under Wagner’s guidance, won him the Prix de Rome and a year in Italy. The cubic houses of the south, with their flat roofs and smooth façades, seem to have given the first push to his strict geometry.

In 1897 Hoffmann returned to Vienna, joined Wagner’s office and in the same year founded the Vienna Secession with Klimt, Olbrich, Moser and others. For the Secession building he designed the foyer and the office, planned the first exhibitions and wrote the group’s first manifesto, which called for buildings without useless ornament. He did not reject historical tradition altogether: he praised the British Arts and Crafts movement and advised renewing local forms. From 1899 he taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule, the school of arts and crafts in Vienna, where he ran the architecture class for almost four decades, until 1936. Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele and Le Corbusier all counted themselves his informal pupils; he helped Schiele with money, gave Kokoschka work at the Wiener Werkstätte and offered Le Corbusier a job in his office. At the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition he designed the Austrian section, which showed the Secession style to an international public. By then his work was becoming more severe: the square, black and white, less decoration. For his love of the square he was nicknamed “Quadratl-Hoffmann” (“Square Hoffmann”).

In 1903, with Moser and the banker Fritz Waerndorfer, who provided the main capital, he founded the Wiener Werkstätte, a workshop where artists and craftsmen made everything from furniture and lamps to tableware and textiles, aiming at a single total work of art. Hoffmann designed a great many objects for it, among them the Sitzmaschine armchair, the Fledermaus chair for the cabaret of that name (1907) and the Kubus armchair (1910). Some of the models are still produced; the Rundes Modell cutlery is made by Alessi. The workshop closed in 1932.

His first major building was the sanatorium at Purkersdorf near Vienna (1904–1906): squares, rectangles and the chequerboard, repeated in the interiors and furniture. In 1905 Hoffmann left the Secession together with Klimt and Wagner. Next came the Hochstetter House (1906–1907), the Villa Ast (1909–1911), the Villa Skywa-Primavesi (1913–1916), with sculpture by Anton Hanak, and the apartment of Moriz Gallia (1911–1912), whose furniture is now in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. In 1907 he was one of the founders of the Deutscher Werkbund, the German association of artists, architects and manufacturers, and in 1912 of the Austrian one; in 1914 the Austrian pavilion at the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne was his work.

After the First World War Hoffmann became increasingly interested in cheap housing for workers. The Klosehof in Vienna (1924–1925) and the block at Laxenburgerstrasse 94 (1928–1932; 332 apartments) became models for postwar buildings. For the Werkbund exhibition in Vienna of 1930–1932 he designed four houses: each had a glazed staircase on the façade, which made the interior seem more spacious, and a roof terrace borrowed from Le Corbusier. In 1927, on the jury for the League of Nations competition in Geneva, he voted for Le Corbusier’s project. His last major work before the war was the Austrian pavilion at the 1934 Venice Biennale, extremely simple and U-shaped; it was restored in 1984.

In 1938 Hoffmann welcomed the annexation of Austria by Germany, hoping for a revival of his practice. The Nazi architectural ideologue Paul Schmitthenner called him a “degenerate decorative artist”, yet the authorities made use of his fame: he became a special commissioner for Viennese applied arts, and he remodelled the former German embassy into the “Haus der Wehrmacht”, a club for army officers; the building was demolished after 1955. During the war years he completed more than eighty projects, and nothing is known of their realisation. From 1941 he headed the Viennese society of applied arts.

After the war Hoffmann rejoined the Secession in 1945 and was its president from 1948 to 1950; between 1949 and 1953 he designed three large housing complexes in Vienna. He received the Grand Austrian State Prize for Architecture (1950) and honorary doctorates from the Vienna and Dresden universities of technology (1951).

Hoffmann died on 7 May 1956 in his apartment at Salesianergasse 33 in Vienna. The city gave him an honorary grave at the Central Cemetery; the headstone was made by Fritz Wotruba. His birthplace in Brtnice has been a museum since 2006.