Signpost 5: Vienna - Hip to be Square
Between 1850 and 1910 Vienna’s population quadrupled. By mid-1890s it was installing electricity and trams. Otto Wagner was one of the modern Viennese architects who began a transformation of the city. Like Hector Guimard in Paris, Wagner received the commission to design the Stadtbahn, Vienna’s city railway, including the trains, stations, lighting, offices, and more. While his own style of architecture was transformative and modern, he was equally influential as a Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts. His students, including Josef Hoffmann, Kolomon Moser, Josef Olbrich, were the next generation who truly changed Viennese architecture and design. Another student, Czech architect Jan Kotera, took the style back to Prague. Like other European architects at the fin-de-siècle, modernity was their guiding principle. Wagner told his students “the sole departure for our artistic work must be modern life”.
Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station, Vienna
Otto Wagner
1899
Photo credit By Pudelek - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57393272
Josef Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann were members of the Kunstlerhaus, the Viennese art academy that controlled what was acceptable in Austrian art. Younger artists trying to introduce anything new did not get exhibition space or support. In 1897, Hoffmann and Olbrich, along with artist Gustav Klimt, left the Kunstlerhaus, forming the Vienna Secession in order display their art and design. In an odd twist, their antiestablishment group received a plot of land from the very establishment Department of Interior. They selected Joseph Olbrich’s design for an exhibition building which they named Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring), the same name as their journal. Olbrich created an austere, classical facade decorated with stuccoed flower motifs and topped it with a purely decorative gilded dome of interlacing laurel leaves. Above the doorway an inscription proclaimed their philosophy: “To the Age its Art; To the Art its Freedom”.
Vienna Secession Exhibition Building
Josef Olbrich
1897
Photo credit: By Thomas Ledl - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49933831
The nature-inspired elements that softened the severe geometry of the Secession building were more exception than rule in Viennese Art Nouveau. Gustav Klimt painted a frieze around the exhibition space. While his art shared the flattened patterns of Art Nouveau, his figures, bright colors, and glittering gold resembled Byzantine archetypes not depictions of nature. Other prominent Secession architects eschewed nature and symbolism completely. As an architect and designer Josef Hoffman rose to prominence while basing his residential designs and decorative arts almost completely on geometric shapes.
Frieze for Vienna Secession Exhibition Building; Gustav Klimt, 1898
Photo credit: By Gustav Klimt - https://digital.belvedere.at/objects/10528/beethovenfries-die-kunste-paradieschor-und-umarmung, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75070165
Hoffmann was influenced by the simplicity of Austrian vernacular architecture, simple buildings without pomp and stylization, and also the simple ornamentation of the Beidermeier style. His work was modern but he rejected the flourishes of French and Belgian Art Nouveau, replacing the curved lines of nature with rational geometry, particularly the square. For him, the square represented equilibrium, calm, unity, and perfection. It was basis of many of his designs like his fruit basket, a traditionally round object that he reimagines with intersecting squares and rectangles.
Fruit basket
Josef Hoffmann
1904
Photo credit: ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London
In 1903 Hoffmann, along with designer Kolomon Moser, founded the Wiener Werkstätte, a craft workshop inspired by the English Arts and Crafts movement. The workshop’s main concern was the creation of a decorative arts aesthetic appropriate to Vienna’s urban milieu and its middle class. In their working program, the founders declared “Our middle class is far from having fulfilled its duty to the arts . . . As long as our cities, our houses, our rooms, our cupboards, our everyday appliances, our clothes, and our jewels, as long as our language and feelings do not represent the spirit of our age in a purer, simpler, and more beautiful way, we shall remain infinitely backward compared to our ancestors.” With a mission to beautify middle class existence, the workshop brought together artists and craftsmen to produce furniture, textiles, jewelry, ceramics, glass and more, all in a simple geometric style inspired by its founders.
Wineglass
Otto Prutscher for Wiener Werkstätte
@ 1907
Photo credit: © Corning Museum of Glass
Hoffmann may have worried about the aesthetics of middle class homes; however, he wasn’t averse to high-style commissions. In 1905 Belgian coal baron Alphonse Stoclet hired Hoffmann and the Weiner Werkstätte to design a large residence in Victor Horta’s Brussels. Hoffman and company had an unlimited budget to fully design its Gesamtkunstwerk. On the exterior, the classical restraint and apparent simplicity belie the richness of bronze borders that accentuate the corners and elevations. Gustav Klimt decorated the walls with murals and every aspect of the interior from carpet to furniture to decorative hardware was made in Vienna.
Palais Stoclet, Brussels, Josef Hoffmann, 1904-1911
Photo credit: By Photo by PtrQs, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88957082
Unlike many branches of Art Nouveau that ended at the beginning of World War I, the Wiener Werstätte remained in business for nearly three decades until the early 1930s. They completed other architectural commissions like the Purkersdorf Sanatorium in Austria and created interiors and decorative arts that prefigured European modernism. They also opened a number of retail outlets, including one in New York in the early 1920s. As a result, the Vienna style had international reach although its mission to civilize the general public was never fully realized. Like so many other craft workshops, they ultimately catered to well-to-do clients. The Vienna Secession, however, continues to operate to this day and holds exhibitions in the Ver Sacrum.
Adjustable armchair designed for the Purkersdorf Sanatorium
Josef Hoffmann
1908
Photo credit: ©Victoria & Albert Museum