Josef Hoffmann

In the years during and after he designed the Stoclet Palace, Hoffmann continued to build interesting structures, but none gained the attention of the earlier work. notable works made by Hoffmann included a hunting lodge designed for Karl Wittgenstein (1906), the father of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was an important patron of the arts, and provided funding for the construction of the Secession House in Vienna. The hunting lodge has a rustic exterior but an extremely modern interior; the interior walls are paneled with exotic woods in geometric patterns, with gilded decorative elements. Every element, from the dishes to the chairs and parquet floor, was carefully harmonized and proportioned. The antechamber was decorated by the Werkstätte, and features paintings by Carl Otto Czeschka, ceramics by Richard Luksch, and painting on glass attributed to Koloman Moser.

A more modest but colorful creation of Hoffmann was the interior of a popular avant-garde night club, the Fledermaus Cabaret in Vienna (1907) made with the help of the Vienna Werkstätte. The walls and counters were covered with white plaster and or multicolor tiles, while the floors had a checkerboard pattern of black and white. It was designed, following the Werkstätte doctrine, as a total work of art, from the furniture and dishes to the light fixtures, menus, tickets and posters. Hoffmann designed the Fledermaus chairs, which became a symbol of the style.[16]

Other important works include the Hochstetter House in Vienna (1906–1907); and the Villa Ast in Vienna (1909–1911) which was constructed for Eduouard Ast, a businessman and building contractor who pioneered the use of reinforced concrete in Austria, and was a major funder of the Werkstätte. The house was built of reinforced concrete, encrusted with decoration and sculpture. Strongly vertical in design,it was sited atop a stone pedestal that contained the basement, and featured a modern interpretation of a classical facade. It had a loggia with windows on one side, looking out at the garden, which connected with a gallery giving access to the garden, decorated with winding water basins made of concrete. Like the Stoclet Palace, the interior was decorated with fine veined marble plaques of a different colors, and with a colorful painting by Klimt. [17]

In 1911–1912 Hoffman was engaged by Moriz Gallia, a major patron of the Werkstätte, to design the interiors of the five main rooms of his new apartment, including all furniture, rugs, and light fittings. Much of the furniture, mostly in richly carved, ebonised wood with boldly coloured upholstery, survives in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, as the Hoffmann Gallia apartment collection.

Another major work was the Villa Skywa-Primavesi (1913–1916), also in Vienna, for the industrialist Otto Primavesi. This was a veritable palace, 1000 square meters not counting the adjoining buildings, placed in a park and built in the neoclassical modern style, all in white, that Hoffmann favored during this period. The frontons of the building featured sculptures by Anton Hanak. The interiors were in the same modernized neoclassical style, decorated with parquet floors of rare woods, marble plaques on the walls, and sculptural decoration.

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  Decoration for the Cabaret Fledermaus (1907)
• 
  Chair for the Caberet Fledermaus (1906–14)
• 
  Villa Skywa-Primavesi (1913-1916)

Following the First World War, Hoffmann built his last two villas. The first was a country house for Eduard Ast at Velden am Worthersee in Carinthia. It was in a simpler geometric style, with white walls, cubic forms, and just a touch exterior decor, s classical pediment over the front door with topped with statuary.

The second project was a villa for Sonya Knips, famous as the model for one of Klimt's earliest works. She had married the industrialist Anton Knips, who was a major patron of the Werkstätte. This house was different from the others, less geometric in its facade and showed the inspiration of the British Arts and Crafts Movement in its roof and dormer windows. The interior featured a perfect harmony of furniture, wall decoration and detail, and was originally highlighted complemented by three major Klimt paintings, now in museums. [18]

In the 1920s, Hoffmann became particularly interested in building public housing and apartment buildings for working-class residents, to relieve the severe housing shortage after the War. His first such project was in Klosehof, a wealthy neighborhood in Vienna. This was a square building five stories high, sixty meters by sixty meters, with a central courtyard, in which he planned a tower six stories high, with more apartments and, on the ground floor, a day care center for children. The facade was simple, covered with white plaster. The only decorative details were simple columns and pediments over the entrances, and a gabled roof, red trim around the windows.

As the economic crisis of the 1930s deepened, Hoffmann built more public housing in Vienna. The largest project was at Laxenburgerstrasse 94, built between 1928 and 1932. It contained 332 apartments, each with a small balcony, organized in a block six-story buildings around a central courtyard. This simple, functional structure became a model for similar buildings built in Vienna and other cities after the War. [18]

Hoffmann had been a founding member of the Austrian Werkbund, founded in 1914, modeled after the celebrated German Werkbund. He organized several exhibitions for the Werkbund, experimenting with modern architecture. In 1930–32, the Austrian Werkbund created an experimental city, modeled after the German "White City" version created at Suttgart in 1928. For the Exposition, Hoffmann designed four different houses, of different sizes and designs, all simple and practical. They were made of brick covered by plaster. One innovative feature added by Hoffmann was a glass-enclosed stairway on the exterior of each house, which made the interior of the house larger and gave variety to the facade. Another modern feature, borrowed from Corbusier, was a roof terrace on each residence. [19]

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  Sonya Knips House (1924–25)
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  Entrance to Knips House (1924–25)
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  Werkbund model house, Veitingergasse 85 (1930–32)

The last major work of Hoffmann before the Second World War was Austria Pavilion at the 1934 Venice Biennale. The building was of an extreme simplicity, in a U form, with one side slightly longer than the other. The walls were made of crepi in horizontal stripes. The original entrance portal and sculptural decoration designed by Hoffmann were never made due to budget difficulties, but their absence added to the final priority of structure. The building was unused after 1938, when Nazi Germany took over Austria, but was restored in 1984 to its original appearance. [20]

• 
  Austria Pavilion for the Venice Biennale (1934)

In 1936 became Professor Emeritus at the Fine Arts, essentially retired, though he continued to work with his earlier students. In 1937 he presented a model interior, "The Boudoir of a great actress", at the Paris International Exposition of 1937, and designed new interiors for the Hotel Imperial in Vienna. In 1940, he redesigned the interior of the Meissen factory and offices in Vienna. After Nazi Germany forced Austria to unite with Germany, he redesigned the former German Embassy in Vienna to serve as new headquarters of the German Army in Austria. During the War, he made more than eighty projects for houses and other buildings, but there is no record if any were constructed. [10]

In 1945, following the War, Hoffmann rejoined the Vienna Secession, the artistic movement that he, Klimt and Otto Wagner had dramatically quit in 1905. He was elected President of the Secession from 1948 to 1950. Between 1949 and 1953, based on his experience before the War, he designed three large public housing projects in Vienna. [10]

He died on May 7, 1956, at the age of eighty-five, at his apartment at 33 Salesianergasse in Vienna. [10]

Although he said little to his students, Hoffmann was a highly esteemed and admired teacher. He tried to bring out the best in each member of his class by means of challenging assignments, which were occasionally work on real commissions.[21] Where he detected talent among young artists he was willing or eager to promote it; Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele and Le Corbusier were the most prominent beneficiaries of his benevolence towards a promising next generation; others strongly influenced by his aesthetic included the American designers Edward H. and Gladys Aschermann and Louise Brigham. German designer Anni Schaad was another of his students. Le Corbusier was offered a job in his office, Schiele was helped financially and Kokoschka was given work in the Wiener Werkstätte. As a member of the international jury for the competition to design a palace for the League of Nations at Geneva in 1927, Hoffmann belonged to the minority who voted for Le Corbusier's project, and the latter always spoke with admiration of his Viennese colleague. Hoffmann had voted for the union of Austria with Germany and, as noted in Tim Bonyhady's "Good Living Street. The fortunes of my Viennese family" (2011), the architect was admired by the Nazis who appointed him a Special Commissioner for Viennese Arts and Crafts and commissioned him to remodel the former German embassy building into the "Haus der Wehrmacht" for army officers. Following its use by the British Government from 1945 to 1955 it was demolished. Hoffmann died in Vienna, aged 85.

His international exhibition work helped to make his name widely known, and many distinguished contributors to the Festschrift on his 60th birthday acclaimed him as a master. Honours bestowed on him included the cross of a commander of the Légion d’honneur and the Honorary Fellowship of the American Institute of Architects. The critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock in 1929 wrote, "In Germany as well as in Austria, Hoffmann’s manner has profoundly influenced the New Tradition". Only three years later, however, when he published The International Style together with Philip Johnson, Hitchcock no longer mentioned Hoffmann's name. Siegfried Giedion in his influential Space, Time and Architecture did not do justice to Hoffmann's oeuvre because it would not fit easily into his polemically simplified version of architectural history.

Despite honours and praise on the occasions of Hoffmann's 80th and 85th birthdays, he was virtually forgotten by the time of his death. Although his true stature and contribution were acknowledged by such masters as Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Gio Ponti and Carlo Scarpa, the younger generation of architects and historians ignored him.

The process of rediscovery and reappraisal began in 1956 with a small book by Giulia Veronesi, and gained momentum during the 1970s with a number of exhibitions and smaller publications. In the 1980s several monographs were published and major exhibitions held. Imitations of his style also began to appear, and replicas of his furniture, fabrics, and of some objects he had designed became commercial successes, while original pieces and drawings from his hand fetched record prices in the auction-rooms.

Josef Hoffmann's son, Wolfgang Hoffmann, together with his father's former student Pola Weinbach Hoffmann (later Pola Stout), emigrated to New York in 1925 and made significant contributions to American modernism.[22]

• 1950: Grand Austrian State Prize for Architecture
• 1951: Honorary Doctorate of the Vienna University of Technology[23]
• Honorary Doctor of the Dresden University of Technology[24]

• 1900–1911 Designer for Hohe Warte Artists’ Colony
• 1900–1901 Double House for Koloman Moser and Carl Moll
• 1904 Sanatorium Purkersdorf
• 1905–1906 House for the writer Richard Beer-Hofmann in Vienna
• 1905–1911 Stoclet Palace in Brussels, Belgium
• 1907 Interior decoration of Kabarett Fledermaus in Vienna
• 1909–1911 Ast Residence in Vienna
• 1913–1915 Skywa-Primavesi Residence in Vienna
• 1913–1914 Country house for Otto Primavesi (www.primavesi.eu) in Kouty nad Desnou (Winkelsdorf), Moravia (destroyed by fire in 1922[25])
• 1919–1924 House for Sigmund Berl in Bruntal, Moravia
• 1920–1921 Villa for Fritz Grohmann in Vrbno pod Pradedem, Moravia
• 1923–1925 Urban Klosehof Housing Complex
• 1924–1925 Villa Knips in Vienna, made for Sonja Knips
• 1930–1932 Four row houses for the Viennese Werkbund's settlement
• 1934 Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale

• 1904 Purkersdorf Armchair
• 1905 Sitzmaschine Armchair
• 1905 Kunstschau Armchair
• 1905–1910 Stoclet Palace Armchair
• 1907 Fledermaus Chair
• 1908 Siebenkugelstuhl Chair
• 1908 Armloffel Chair
• 1910 Kubus Armchair
• 1910 Club Armchair
• 1911 Haus Koller Chair

• Stefan Üner: Josef Hoffmann, in: Parnass, vol. 1, Vienna 2022, p. 166–167
• Sarnitz, August (2016). Josef Hoffmann, L'univers de la beauté (in French). Cologne: Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8365-5038-3.
• Sarnitz, August (2007). Josef Hoffmann. In the Realm of Beauty. Cologne: Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-5591-1.
• Fahr-Becker, Gabriele (2008). Wiener Werkstätte: 1903‒1932. Cologne: Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-3773-3.
• Sekler, Eduard (1982). Josef Hoffmann. Das Architektonische Werk; Monographie und Werkverzeichnis. Salzburg: Residenz. ISBN 3-7017-0306-X.
• Vives Chillida, Julio (2008). Josef Hoffmann y Jacob & Josef Kohn en la Kunstschau Wien de 1908, (La pequeña casa de campo: una efímera obra de arte total). Lulu.com (print on demand). ISBN 978-1-4092-0239-4.
• Huey, Michael, ed. (2003) Viennese Silver. Modern Design 1780–1918, exhibition catalogue for the Neue Galerie New York, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern. ISBN 978-3-7757-1317-7.
• Witt-Dörring, Christian, ed. (2006) Josef Hoffmann Interiors 1902–1913, exhibition catalogue for the Neue Galerie New York, Prestel Verlag, New York. ISBN 978-3-7913-3710-4.

• Quotations related to Josef Hoffmann at Wikiquote
• Media related to Josef Hoffmann at Wikimedia Commons
• Papers of Josef Franz Maria Hoffmann at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession No. 850997. Correspondence, manuscripts, photographs and other papers of the Austrian designer and architect, Josef Hoffmann, document his involvement in the arts and crafts movement and his writings in art education. The bulk of the papers date to the 1920s and 1930s.
• Lamps and furnitures designed by Josef Hoffmann for the Wiener Werkstaette
• Fabrics designed by Josef Hoffmann for the Wiener Werkstatte
• A 40 min Video by WOKA, Wolfgang Karolinsky, Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstaette from 1991