JANUARY 2016 - JOSEF HOFFMANN

LINES AND SQUARES

Josef Hoffmann is a bridge between the world of the Belle Epoque and international Modernism. He studied with Otto Wagner and created dreamy vernacularist works like the Hohe Warte outside Vienna in 1905.

However, while working on these designs, he was also concieving the Sanitorium Punkersdorf, also outside Vienna, begun just one year later in 1906.

Fans of architectural history will see why Le Corbusier and Gio Ponti cite Hoffmann as an important early influence.

What is important to us about Hoffmann is how he embodies both continuity and change, how his innate geometries are expressed through his stylistic evolution. Largely due to his in-between position in the polemics surrounding modernist architecture, he was forgotten at the time of his death in 1956, only rehabilitated in the 1970s, once modernism had run its course.

The clarity of his lines as well as the generosity of his playfulness are a source of constant inspiration to us.