Architect and designer Josef Hoffman was born in Moravia, now Czechoslovakia, in 1870. He created beautiful artifacts over a half century in which the conditions and nature of architectural practice changed considerably.

Educated at the Viennese Academy, Hoffman was influenced by the stark whitewashed walls of the Italian villas he visited and by his mentor Otto Wagner, whose theories of a functional, modern architecture profoundly affected his work. Hoffman's works combined functionality and simplicity of production with refined and innovative ornamental details. The use of geometric and cubist forms are rudimentary principles found in modern furniture design

Order a remarkably well made reproduction of this famous Hoffman Kubus Chairs .

In 1897 he was one of the founders of an association of revolutionary artists and architects, the Vienna Secession, and in 1903 Hoffman helped found the influential Wiener Werkstatte, the "Vienna Workshops," a development of Art Nouveau which resisted increasing mass production, called for integration of the fine and applied arts and the treatment of everyday objects with refined craftsmanship and aesthetic consideration. Producing everything from furniture and glass to jewelry, it was one of the high points of modern design history and a beacon for later artists and designers producing some of the earliest Art Deco designs.

In furniture projects, the black-stained oak desk made in 1905 for his wealthy patrons, the Wittgenstein family, is one of Hoffmann's most architectural designs and resembles abstract sculpture. A remarkable series of armchairs and sofas clearly showed Hoffmann's passion for geometrical forms with rectangular shapes divided into identically-sized sections.

Perhaps the best known of the many houses he helped to design was the Palais Stoclet completed in 1911 in Brussels, with mosaic murals by Gustave Klimt, marking the transition from the curving lines of Art Nouveau to the more geometric Art Deco style.

Hoffman died in Vienna in 1956 after a productive career spanning fifty years.

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