Josef Hoffmann

Josef Hoffmann was an Austrian architect, a pioneer of European modernism, and founder of the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshop). Josef Franz Maria Hoffmann was born in Pirnitz (now Czech Republic) and 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 under Carl von Hasenauer and Otto Wagner. Josef Hoffmann's theories of a functional, modern architecture profoundly effected his architectural works. He won the Rome prize in 1895 and the following year joined the Wagner's office.

In 1899, Josef Hoffmann became professor at the Kunstgewerbeschule (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, of which would both become Hoffmann's stylistic hallmarks.

The furniture that Josef Hoffman designed for production at the Wiener Werkstätte exercised a great influence on the European taste for several decades. The furniture's simplicity paved the way for the plainer surface articulation and purity of modernism.