Background
Josef Hoffmann was Josef Franz Maria Hoffmann was born in Pirnitz (Brtnice) on December 15, 1870.
Josef Hoffmann was Josef Franz Maria Hoffmann was born in Pirnitz (Brtnice) on December 15, 1870.
He studied architecture at the trade school in Brünn. Following his graduation in 1891 he went to Würzburg 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. During his studies and early professional years Hoffmann assimilated the historicist architectural traditions of Vienna, as exemplified in the work of Hasenauer and Wagner, 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 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 Düsseldorf. Together with Kolo Moser, Hoffmann founded in 1903 the Wiener Werkstätte 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. Hoffmann's opus magnum, the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, was designed in 1905 and built between 1905 and 1911. Both the Purkersdorf Sanatorium and the Palais Stoclet were entirely furnished by the Wiener Werkstätte. 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-19206 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.
